When you plan your night out, why not start it off with Motel Destino, a Brazilian noir that’s defiantly sexy, sweaty, and dripping with spontaneous energy? Without giving away the ending, the erotic thriller concludes with loud, pounding electronica and flashing lights that blast over the credits. As the names of the gaffer and catering staff scroll across the screen, the cinema transforms into an ecstatic dance floor.
“I love making films, but what I really love is clubbing,” Karim Aïnouz tells me with a laugh on the day of the UK premiere, which happens to be followed by a DJ set. “As a gay man, for my generation, it was the only place that you felt safe. There’s utopia in clubbing. I love techno music.” The 59-year-old Brazilian director, who’s sat across me in a meeting room in Holborn, recalls learning in postproduction that the film would compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. “It’s such a conservative space with people dressed up. I wanted [the end credits] to burn down the Lumière! There’s a sense of seriousness that’s so important to break.”
Motel Destino, then, is a complete U-turn from Aïnouz’s previous film, Firebrand, which competed for the Palme d’Or a year earlier. Whereas Firebrand is a period-drama about Henry VIII starring Alicia Vikander and Jude Law, Motel Destino is a loose, lurid head-trip with so much sex, a version re-edited for an airplane would be almost non-existent. “It really short-circuited a lot of people’s minds that I made both films [in two years],” says Aïnouz. “In France, they were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
Set in the Brazilian state of Ceará, Motel Destino follows Heraldo (Iago Xavier), a 21-year-old man who visits a roadside hideout after a botched heist leads to his brother being shot. At Motel Destino, Heraldo enters into a secret affair with one of the employees, Dayana (Nataly Rocha), despite the nearby presence of her violent husband, Elias (Fábio Assunção). Aïnouz worked on the script with Wislan Esmeraldo and Mauricio Zacharias – the latter co-wrote Ira Sachs’ Passages, another love triangle story.
However, despite the plot machinations, Motel Destino is primarily about depicting its characters’ insatiable desires, whether they be sexual or vengeful. The relationship between Heraldo and Dayana forms through the duo’s inability to keep their hands off each other; in moments they’re simply conversing, their words compete with the sound of strangers fornicating in the room next-door. The film is so proudly sordid, porn often plays in the background, while animals seen through the window get it on, too.
“The landscape of sexual imagery has been taken over by the internet,” says Aïnouz. “But in Motel Destino, there’s sex because: why not? It shouldn’t be an issue. It’s like shooting a character eating breakfast. It’s a way of portraying someone. The other thing is, a sexual encounter can be revolutionary. Not a love relationship, but literally a sexual encounter. It’s an important part of human life. The way the characters meet is how they relate to each other physically. It’s not pornography. It’s celebrating vitality.”
Aïnouz admits he was “not happy” when he was first told an intimacy coordinator would be required for Firebrand, and when interviewing another intimacy coordinator for Motel Destino, he was similarly frustrated. “I was like, ‘Why am I doing this? I know what the actors should be doing.’ But it’s mandatory. So I said, ‘Fine, let’s meet.’” His collaboration with Roberta Serrado, though, ended up positive. “It’s about creating a safe space for the actors, but it was also useful for the story. She was like, ‘What about this position? Where will it be shot? Are they standing up? Is it in the bedroom? Could it be elsewhere?’ It’s not a censor, it’s like having a stunt coordinator.”
Motels are a place of jouissance, a place of orgasm, a place of absolute liberation. They’re also a place of illicit activities
Careful planning also went into the portrayal of Motel Destino and its day-to-day operations. As Dayana explains, first you strip the bed, then you check for ejaculate stains, and it’s likely you’ll find sand that’s travelled from the beach. “Orgies are the worst,” she groans. Aïnouz reveals that these details were all based on research, and the actors spent a week working at the motel. “In the 1930s, in the US, with prohibition, motels became a place of alcohol trafficking,” says Aïnouz. “Motels are a place of jouissance, a place of orgasm, a place of absolute liberation. They’re also a place of illicit activities.”
Motel Destino was originally financed in 2017 but then cancelled during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. After Firebrand, which he describes as “classical”, Aïnouz wanted his follow-up to feel like a debut feature – even if, in reality, it’s his ninth. “With the election of Lula, I brought it back to life,” he says. “I wanted to shoot it in a place where I spent my summer holidays as a child. I wanted something bright, explosive, and bigger than life.”
However, Motel Destino differs from everything that preceded Firebrand, too. Aïnouz’s earlier features range from The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, a prize-winner at Cannes in 2019, to Madame Satã, his debut feature from 2002 about a Black drag artist. “Making Madame Satã, for me, was a question of life and death,” he says. “I had never seen those characters on the screen. Today, that film probably should be made by an African-Brazilian director. Yet I think being queer allowed me to have a place where I could talk about that character.”
The conversation moves onto racism. “Cinema is important in Brazil, but what really counts is TV. That’s what people watch. Soap operas have been whitening the country. The first protagonist in a Brazilian soap opera who wasn’t white was [Lázaro Ramos, the lead of] Madame Satã. We need to undo what television has done in the last 50 years. Brazil is not a white country, and it’s been perceived as a white country with some Black people. But historically it’s the place with the biggest number of enslaved people coming from Africa. We, white directors, can produce, or help others make movies.”
Aïnouz picks up a Motel Destino poster and points to Iago Xavier. “It was important to cast Heraldo as Afro-native. That mixture is very specific to Brazil. It’s criminal we don’t have enough films with Black and mixed characters. The amount of non-white Brazilian directors? It’s a question of historical reparations.”
Born in Fortaleza to a Brazilian mother and Algerian father, Aïnouz moved to New York in his twenties to study filmmaking. Nowadays, he lives in Berlin, which he admits suits his clubbing activities. However, in his Brazilian films, he still faces certain pressures. “When you’re a filmmaker from the Global South, you’re obliged to depict reality,” he says. “We’re not supposed to do genre, we’re supposed to do drama. Audiences [from other countries] don’t want to see our imagination, they want to see the world we live in.”
He thus considers Motel Destino liberating, particularly for the animals cameoing in the motel. Upon spotting chickens, donkeys, snakes, and a goat near the location, he stuck them into the film, often indoors. “It’s my first movie that inhabits a character’s headspace. I don’t know what those [animal] images mean, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the sensation that they bring.”
Aïnouz has already shot his next film, Rosebush Pruning, which is due to premiere at a festival very soon. Starring Riley Keough, Callum Turner, and Pamela Anderson, Rosebush Pruning was penned by Efthimis Filippou, who wrote Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer with Yorgos Lanthimos. Weary of being told all the time about his “great female characters”, Aïnouz set out to make a movie about toxic men. So in 2021 he asked Filippou to reinterpret Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 drama Fists in the Pocket.
“I’ve always been interested in the nuclear family as a place of dystopia,” says Aïnouz, laughing. “It’s not a comedy, it’s satire. There’s a level of detachment, and yet I was really interested in those characters. It’s like nothing I’ve done before.” Returning to clubbing, the director adds, “It’s like I’m on a dance floor. I want to try different rhythms. I want to experiment. I’m not after a linear career trajectory – I’m interested in fun and desire.”
Motel Destino is out in UK cinemas on May 9.
