| Suite Dreams, better
known over here in Japan as The Uchoten Hotel,
instilled some considerable level of anticipation
in me when I saw it on the shelf at the rental
store. A number of my beloved students had seen
it in theaters, and, as they are, together, one
of the most effective instigators of my cinematic
curiosity, I snapped it up readily—even
before it was in the cheap and old section. This
was also the first Koki Mitani film that I sat
through to the end, and at first, as the absurd
antics began to unravel, I found myself becoming
a content and happy viewer, completely unsuspecting
of the insulting crap coming my way at the end
of my stay…
Let's dig into the story—there's
a lot to cover. Shindo (Koji Yakusho, 1996's Shall
We Dance, Memoirs of a Geisha)
is a very busy hotel accommodation manager, even
busier now because of the impending New Years
celebration that night. There are scads and scads
of problems screaming for attention, and Shindo
graciously and competently attends to them, humbly
submitting to his moronic superiors and always
going the extra mile or two to make his guests
happy. However, when his ex-wife (Mieko Harada)
shows up, Shindo can't bring himself to tell her
the truth of what's become of him since their
divorce—that he abandoned his dreams and
is now working at the hotel. Shindo had aspired
to greatness in stage directing in his past life,
and thus now stages an increasingly difficult
(and stupid) charade as an award-winning star
of his former field of work to earn his former
wife's admiration. Meanwhile, Kenji the bell boy
(Shingo Kattori, the ever-grinning member of super-phenomenon
pop band SMAP) has chosen this night to quit his
own great dream—to make it as a singer.
Thus he is leaving his job as a bell boy at the
hotel to move back to his hometown, a move which
inspires much melancholy in his peers. However,
the hotel is so busy that night that when a mega-popular
enka singer comes to stay, Shindo asks Kenji for
help in seeing to the spoiled crooner—and
this might just be Kenji's in for a music career.
Meanwhile again, when two cleaning maids go to
straighten up the room of a horribly messy, thoughtless
woman while she's out, one of the maids, the rebellious
Hana (Takako Matsu), decides to try on some of
the fancy clothes and jewelry laid strewn about.
While decked out in said expensive threads, she
is promptly mistaken for the guest of the room.
Seems the messy lady has also been making a mess
of a rich man's marriage, and his son has come
to pay her to break it off. Meanwhile again, a
corrupt and fantastically selfish politician (Koichi
Sato, who also starred in the abysmal navy thriller
Aegis) is hiding from the press, unsure
of his next step and unaware that the woman with
whom he created a scandal and an illegitimate
child is working as a cleaning lady at that same
hotel. Meanwhile yet again… well, I could
go on and on. Suffice it to say that there is
also a romance going on in which a man is trying
to earn forgiveness for wearing his lover's underwear,
there's a ventriloquist's duck named Dabudabu
on the loose, the owner of the hotel is running
around in face-paint and scaring people, a call-girl
breaks in repeatedly and torments one of her former
clients with pictures of their dirty deeds together,
etc, etc, etc. Suite Dreams is a great
collision of zany, fast-changing plotlines that
intertwine and accelerate in manic energy until
the astoundingly awful pay-off. But we'll get
to that later.
I can't really fault most of the
performances—not much. The characters aren't
especially deep, but they are fun and well-played.
Koji
Yakusho as the straight-laced Shindo is deeply
likable—you see that smiling face and you
want him to win, and his crumbling façade
that he puts up for his wife is embarrassingly
funny… although occasionally it becomes
simply embarrassing. I always enjoy Shingo Kattori,
and although his turn as bell-boy Kenji is quite
subdued in comparison to the parts I have seen
him play before, he has an earnestness that is
compelling. Ryoko Shinohara as the prostitute
is very delightful—her energy and playfulness
is, I think, quite effective and highly entertaining,
although I could see some people annoyed by her.
One of my favorite parts was also one of the smallest—the
diminutive detective Kuroda, as performed by Masanori
Ishii. His character is a parody of old film noir
detectives, and he even wears a fedora and matching
old-fashioned coat. Every scene he was in was
made better, whether he was trying to catch Dabudabu
or chasing a man with a big pipe. I think the
only grating character was Sakura Cherry, a jazz-singer
hopeful played by Japanese celebrity You…
yes, she calls herself You. (Sounds like the beginning
of an Abbot and Costello skit.) Her character,
in my opinion anyway, is a highly obnoxious, nearly-brainless
tool of the plot whose actions are bizarre—that
is to say, they yank the plot along without really
building her character beyond anything but annoying.
I wish I could say that faults
cannot be found in the plot, but such is for not.
Inspired by an old film called Grand Hotel,
Suite Dreams wraps countless curving plotlines
together and, at least at first, creates a delightful,
absorbing diversion. As tensions build and the
plotlines tangle and pull nearly hard enough to
snap, I found myself grinning along at the manifold
misfortunes of the characters involved—that
is, until the plot did snap and I found myself
to be the unfortunate one. When I first saw this
film, the events of the climax left me outraged,
berating my faithful television as the asinine
events unfolded. The movie sets up a great cast
of characters—and then sacrifices them at
the altar of the film's message, shredding what
we understood of the characters in service for
a fatuous moral.
The message is, essentially, that
you should always be true to yourself and do what
you want to do, no matter what other people think.
(And apparently no matter what it does to those
other people.) Near the end of the film, suddenly
this "moral" is being spewed forth by
nearly all the characters as some of them do hurtful,
stupid things in the name of this lifestyle. In
this movie's world, it's perfectly all right to
be a jerk, disobey your superiors, and put unfair,
massive workloads on your employees. Hurting your
family? That's okay. Doing the "right thing"
doesn't really matter at all, either, if it doesn't
line up with who you are. All that matters to
this plot is "being yourself" and "doing
what you want." It's not funny, and it certainly
isn't uplifting. As the movie ends, and Shindo
has gone from considerate, kind man to a jerk
who proudly trips up his enemies, he steps forward
to speak to the screen, inviting the viewer into
the mad house that we have just witnessed.
I'm sorry, I think I'd rather stay
somewhere else. The delivery of the already insultingly-stupid
message is ham-fisted and as subtle as a block
of cement to the face. We're supposed to be able
to root on the characters, but instead we find
them making fantastically stupid decisions just
to push forward a message that, if applied, would
lead to a world filled with self-centered, unthinking
brutes. I despise the ending to this movie.
As for the music, what is presented
here is sparse but highly enjoyable. Original
music by Yusuke Honma (who also did music for
the Fushigi Yuugi anime series) is brass-heavy,
old-school big band, sometimes almost sounding
like high-class circus music. It's playful and
happy and fits the plot very well. Shingo Kattori
also sings a memorable little number about Don
Quixote while playing an acoustic guitar, and
You provides a rousing jazz song at the climax.
Altogether, the movie provides a satisfying aural
mix to go with the dissatisfying plotting wreck.
It's not that Suite Dreams
is a terrible movie. It's well-made with fun characters
and a number of genuine laughs. However, the movie
goes so very, very wrong in the end. It's kind
of like going to a really nice hotel, having a
great stay, and then discovering as you go to
pay that, as a surcharge, you need to undergo
a frontal lobotomy. Watch only with brains turned
off.
|
(2/5)