FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Fallin' for Niagara's kitsch
Australian director's debut Hotel de Love gives a cynic's take on the art of love
By Cynthia AmsdenHotel de Love
Opens Friday, February 21
At the GlobeIf you want to see what Canada's own City of Style, our mecca of kitsch,can truly inspire on an international level, watch Australian Craig Rosenberg's romantic comedy, Hotel de Love. Yes, this film director travelled halfway around the world, actually made his way down around luscious Lake Ontario and booked his single artistic self into one of our finest tacky honeymoon hotels in Niagara Falls. In a telephone interview with Rosenberg at his home Down Under, he explains his inspiration.
"I was flying solo and I think that's why the manager liked me so much because no one else would talk to him," Rosenberg says. "There were all these romantic starry-eyed people, deeply in love, who completely ignored him. So I spent hours talking to this manager who told me funny stories about brides and grooms who'd have these huge rows in the foyer of the hotel, still in their bridal gear.
"They'd just come out of the limo and they hadn't even gotten up to their rooms yet and they were yelling at each other. Then the bride would call up her mom and say, 'It's all off, come and get me!"
The cynicism of the hotel manager was the spark Rosenberg needed. "In comedy, I'm always looking for a contrast or something that's inappropriate, so a cynic running a honeymoon hotel was interesting to me."
The story begins when twin brothers Rick (Aden Young from Black Robe) and Stephen (Simon Bossell) fall in love with vivacious Melissa (Saffron Burrows in Circle of Friends). Rick wins, Stephen loses, Melissa moves away and life goes on. Ten years later, the brothers are now in their ubiquitous 20s. Rick works at Australia's Hotel de Love, reputed for its utterly tasteless theme rooms (including the ever-enchanting football stadium suite), his brother Stephen, is a lonely stockbroker, and who should book herself in to the hotel for a romantic old-time's-sake holiday, but Melissa and her new man. Who says you never get a second chance?
Hotel de Love is the directorial debut for Rosenberg. Prior to this, he studied law in Melbourne (fertile ground for any budding cynic) and film at UCLA. A longtime writer, he won five national awards for his short fiction in 1992 and sold his first screenplay in '93.
Rosenberg comes by his love of kitsch honestly as there is nothing in Australia which even approaches Niagara Falls. He appreciates the nature of the beast, being that if you take "tacky" and move it up several notches on the food chain, you end up with something that qualifies as kitsch, verging on camp. And once you go a little past that on the evolutionary scale, you end up with "cult."
"It's a funny combination of things. At times I wanted to have fun with the tackiness of it; at other times I wanted it to be kind of kitsch; and at other times I wanted it to have that next level, that hip irony, that hip coolness.
"For example, all these romantics worship the little three-foot waterfall there, Niagara Smalls, which definitely goes into that sublime, rarefied atmosphere," he explains, all the while chuckling at the ludicrousness of the entire concept.
Ahhh, love in the new millennium.
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