LAST ROOM

Rather than in the doorway of a last room indicated by the title, Pierre Carniaux
invites us to stroll in a hotel maze in Japan. And to make us listen to several
characters, one, naked in the water of an old-fashioned bathtub; others stretched
out on vast beds or thin futons; or still others jammed into the narrowness of real
hotel rooms that are like cells. To each his own room, his own type of hotel, even if
the layout seems sometimes random, to each as well his own story, even if all the
narratives intermingle in a dreamlike state, where none claims more than another
to be exceptional. Secrets follow and intersect. It’s a question here of work, as in
the hotel cleaning man. It’s a question here of complex origins, a young woman,
relying on a drawing, tells the fate of her father, a Korean prisoner of war hired by
force in the mines who escapes several times and who finally decided of his own
initiative to remain in Japan. It’s a question here of a dancer found murdered under
a hotel mattress. In a nutshell, it’s a question here of Japan and its gray zones, as
if this island were inhabited by ghosts, as if this miniature continent were imagined
out loud by its disillusioned inhabitants who prefer to take refuge in the night.
“Carniaux succinctly describes his film as a “Black poem,” but it’s a special black
that knows, with each line, how to return to new depths and to invent very surprising
sparkling on the surface. (JPR)