By Robert Koehler

TIFF may have been thrown for a loop by COVID-19, but it’s nothing compared to Wang Xiaoshuai, who has tried—along with screenwriters Ning Dai and Ye Fu—to make something from the quarantine setting in his film, The Hotel. Imagine a combination of a stripped-down Grand Hotel or California Suite with contemporary Chinese sophisticates, comprising a string of actor workshop dialogues (“In this one, the daughter will tell her mother that she wants more freedom in her life. And…scene!”), and you get a sense of this unfortunately botched experiment. From Sarah Moss’ novel, The Fell, to Miguel Gomes’ ingenious The Tsugua Diaries (2021), artistic responses to COVID are piling up, but The Hotel illustrates that holding a cluster of characters under (luxurious) lock-and-key can be fraught with problems. Not least of these is the temptation to force characters to explain themselves in on-the-nose exchanges that mechanically bring the audience up to speed with who’s who and what they want.

This information unfolds as not very interesting. Nineteen-turning-twenty Sova (a spirited Ning Yuanyuan, Ning Dai’s daughter) is stuck with her mother, Dan (Qu Ying), in a luxe hotel in Chiang Mai, Thailand, during the pandemic. When she’s not sparring with Dan, Sova alternately flirts with Chinese dissident professor Yu Feng (Ye Fu) and the more age-appropriate Thai-born A Dong (Worrapon Srisai), a man-servant to the blind Ding Ge (Dai Jun). Feng is in perpetual fights with his bitter wife Hongyu (Huang Xiaolei) that grow quickly tiresome, though the couple’s edges are softened in later scenes. Sova’s point of view eventually dominates, but the contrived finale involving her and her mother is dramatically exhausted soap opera material, the sort of thing that would be tossed out of a Playwriting 101 class.  

Robert Koehler