New Rose Hotel (1998)

Official trailer

Cyberpunk in a Hotel Bar

William Gibson’s short story New Rose Hotel is a few pages of cold, sharp, near-future noir: two freelance operators engineer the defection of a brilliant scientist from one giant corporation to another, using a woman as bait, and it all goes wrong. In 1998, Abel Ferrara, the director of Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, turned it into a film.

Walken plays Fox, the talker, the dreamer, obsessed with the power of corporations and his own cleverness. Dafoe plays X, his quieter partner. Asia Argento plays Sandii, the young woman they hire and train to seduce Hiroshi, a Japanese scientist, and lure him away from Maas, the corporation that owns him.

On paper, that’s a terrific cast and a terrific idea. On screen, it’s something much stranger and much sleepier.

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. Walken, Dafoe and a Gibson story should add up to something I’d rave about, and what I got was a gorgeous, sleepy mood piece that forgets to tell its own story. There are stretches I enjoy and stretches I’d skip, and that split is exactly where the 5 comes from.

No Money

The first thing you notice is that there’s no cyberpunk anywhere. Gibson’s world of vast corporate arcologies and neon cities is nowhere to be seen. Instead you get hotel rooms, bars, restaurants and grainy video footage, all shot as if on a budget of about eleven dollars. It could be set in 1998 as easily as the future.

Ferrara makes a virtue of it, sort of. The film feels claustrophobic and dreamy, a world made of screens, surveillance footage and people talking in dark rooms. Some of it is hypnotic. A lot of it is just murky. The cheapness costs the film less than the murk does. I can forgive a hotel room standing in for the future. What I can’t forgive is how often I can’t tell what I’m looking at, or why Ferrara wants me looking at it.

Walken and Dafoe

Walken walks off with the film. He’s twitchy, strange and magnetic, delivering Fox’s long, rambling monologues about corporations as if they were love poems. He’s always watchable, even when you can’t tell what he’s talking about, and there are moments where he’s funny.

Walken is the reason I’d sit through it again. He delivers corporate paranoia like a lounge singer with a secret, and whenever he’s on screen the movie wakes up.

Dafoe is quieter, wearier and increasingly obsessed with Sandii, who he’s supposed to be managing and who he falls for instead. He’s good, as always, but the script gives him little to do except look haunted. The two of them together are a pleasure to watch, and they deserve a better film.

Sandii

Asia Argento plays Sandii, and she’s the film’s mystery. She’s seductive, playful and utterly unreadable, and neither Fox nor X, nor the audience, can tell whether she’s loyal to them or working an angle of her own. The film spends a lot of time watching her, often in ways that feel more like leering than storytelling.

Her seduction of Hiroshi, played by the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, happens mostly off screen, reported in fragments. The defection itself, the whole reason for the plot, barely appears. Ferrara is far more interested in mood and obsession than in plot. The off-screen defection loses me. Hiding it means the whole plot happens somewhere I’m not allowed to go, and the camera’s leering at Argento doesn’t make up for it. I’d have traded twenty minutes of watching her for five minutes of watching the con work.

The Reruns

Then comes the film’s most notorious choice. After the scheme collapses, the last half hour or so replays scenes from earlier in the movie, alternate takes, slightly different angles, the same moments seen again, as X sits alone in a coffin-sized capsule hotel, the New Rose Hotel of the title, going over everything in his memory.

The idea makes sense: he’s replaying the past, trying to work out where it went wrong and whether Sandii ever loved him. In practice, it’s tedious. You’ve seen these scenes. Watching them again, with small differences, feels less like insight and more like the film running out of footage. Some critics defend it as a daring structural experiment. I can follow the argument and I don’t buy it. For most viewers, me included, it feels like the DVD skipped back, and it’s the stretch that drags the whole film down to a 5.

Where It Works

There are moments of real atmosphere. The opening scenes, with Walken holding forth in a rain-soaked car, have a seedy charm. The relationship between X and Sandii has a sad, doomed edge. And the ending, with X alone in his capsule, waiting for a corporation to come and kill him, captures Gibson’s bleak vision of people crushed between giant companies.

Ferrara fans will find more to admire than most. His films are rarely comfortable, and this one is at least unlike anything else.

Where It Doesn’t

The plot is almost invisible, the budget shows everywhere, the pacing is sluggish, and the final half hour of reruns will test anyone’s patience. The science-fiction elements are so thin they might as well not be there, and Gibson fans expecting his cyberpunk world will be baffled. New Rose Hotel is a strange, murky, occasionally hypnotic curiosity with two great actors doing their best, and it’s for Ferrara completists and Walken devotees only.

Craft Note

Where does New Rose Hotel (1998) go wrong?

Only for Walken and Dafoe fans or Abel Ferrara completists.

It’s a 5 because the good half is worth having: Walken’s monologues, the doomed edge between X and Sandii, and that last image of X alone in his capsule. The other half is murk, a missing plot and a half hour of reruns that wore my patience down to nothing. Read the Gibson story instead. It does in a few pages what the film can’t manage at feature length.

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