Exclusive Trailer and Poster for Love Hotel Restores Shinji Somai’s Pinku Classic

Does the English language contain six sweeter words than “A Pinku Classic from Shinji Somai”? The last couple of years have seen his work restored and properly released with enough diligence and passion to elevate him from cinephile obscurity to Japanese canon; in the flux of things there’s been a big absence left by Love Hotel, a heartrending and (what else?) elegantly photographed work for the Directors Company. Cinema Guild, continuing to do the Lord’s work, have acquired it (alongside Somai’s even-rarer The Friends) and will release a restoration at Metrograph on April 4. Ahead of this, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the trailer and poster.

Here’s the official synopsis: “A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, ‘night-blooming flower,’ and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity and coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together. It’s a film with a uniquely materialist sense of eros manifested in Shinji Somai’s long takes, each shot a tightrope-like predicament flushed with earthly tension and live-wire physicality. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, this elegiac erotica is one of Somai’s most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, a high-water mark of Nikkatsu Studio’s legendary Roman Porno cycle of films.”

Find preview and poster (by Brian Hung) below: