In 2019, I was trying to write a feature film called Love & Death. In this story, the literal personifications of these words sat on a bench in a park and talked about what troubled them. It was my way of trying to understand the connection between them. As I wrote the character descriptions for each of them, I came to understand that I was giving them the worst qualities associated with these words and that the characters themselves were becoming far more interesting than the story. So, I shelved the project knowing that the characters had a lot of potential in them. Last year, when I came upon the idea of losing more than one’s virginity – part of one’s entire self – I knew exactly which skeletons to use as a base.
Virginity has always been a unique topic for me. I tried perusing it from various angles but none of them worked. Saying it also didn’t work. So, I tried to understand its transactional nature and it hit me – what if in pursuit of losing this thing we called virginity, a construct of our own making, we lost something more? Something that on the surface seemed to have helped us but in reality, poses a far more philosophical question not unlike the problem of the Ship of Theseus. Bad Memories. I tried my hard to show the banality of this topic and how it folded into its popularity in this society.
Ahmed as a character contains my self-consciousness. Something I consider as a curse. It is not easy living separate from your body always floating above every waking moment of your life. If I see myself doing something, I see myself seeing myself doing something and I see myself see myself seeing myself doing something and it goes on and on like that. It has never let me live in the moment but on the other hand, it has granted me acute observational skills something Ahmed also possesses. April on the other hand contains the macabre aspect of love and sensuality. She carries my self-hate and my occasional suicidal thoughts. Like my other films, they can be considered opposite sides of the same coin but I prefer to view them as two different organisms from separate worlds who have nothing to do with each other. April’s spaceship just crash-landed right outside Ahmed’s convenience store and that’s all.
A large influence on this film is the Asian films of the late 90s and early 2000s. It was a period in Japanese cinema especially when Digital film looked very different because independent filmmakers like Ryuichi Hiroki and Shunji Iwai were shooting films on their own disregarding all the traditional norms and embracing a different form of freestyle than what Godard did during the new wave. In Wong Kar-wai’s films, there is a fatalistic quality to the storytelling. It’s predictable (a word I don’t like in filmmaking, It’s an audience word) yet compelling. That was the problem I faced while writing Love Hotel – How to make the Hotel seem like it is being manifested by the will of these two people and that they themselves don’t know where they are going. This was achieved by the surrealism which had another problem with it. I wanted it to be based in reality rather than making it seem like I want to really tell something contextual. Impressionism is what came to my mind then. Two colors put close enough but separated by a blank canvas can result in a third color in one’s brain and somehow that seems more organic since we interpret colors as data in humans minds. So I decided I am going to use a frame such as the old guy on the balcony and Ahmed looking at him – separated without any emotional connection so that an emotion is created in the audience’s mind and that later when you see April’s memories it’ll all make sense because not only can Ahmed step out from his body, the moment he met April he could stare into a realm where all memories reside.
All of this culminates into the big question at the end. Whether or not he should tell her about what he has taken from her.