Love Hotel

Director: Shinji Sômai

1985 / 88min / DCP

Sōmai, who had been an assistant director at Nikkatsu in the 1970s when Roman Porno sex films became the studio’s stock-in-trade, made his only directorial effort in the genre with this disarmingly poignant, elegantly shot entry into the pinku eiga canon from a script by Takashi Ishii—he later reworked it into his own 1988 Angel Guts: Red Vertigo—which stars Minori Terada as a spiraling ex-businessman who, having squandered his fortune and his dignity and brought terrible suffering upon his wife, hires a sex worker (Noriko Hayami, in her signature role) to share what he intends to be his final night on earth at a hot sheets love hotel.

A Cinema Guild release