Love Hotel

Japanese Love Hotels are secretive labyrinths filled with intimate stories of strangers. The Angelo Hotel in Osaka is one such place. It is not a brothel, but in a conformist society, it is only here where, with wife, mistress, partner or alone, people of all ages may unlock their desires and without judgment – ‘love’ and ‘be’ how they wish. Love Hotel follows everyday people of Osaka from the intimacy of the rooms into their outside realities, revealing the tensions between public/private, fantasy/real and the boundaries in between. They are a married couple, a nurse, lawyers, dominatrix and a pensioner. Unaware of each other, they come to the love hotel where their anonymity is protected, but all share the same longing to love and be loved. Their conversations, sexual expressions, and playful acts range from the tragic and tender, to the mundane, comic and erotic set in the otherworldly spaces of ‘concept’ rooms ranging from SM room to jungle room. Tending to their every need, the hotel’s manager, Tomokazu Ozawa is fighting to save his remaining few ‘concept’ rooms both from ever more conservative right wing political forces and the hotel management eager for more profits. Navigating through darkened back corridors and the monitor room, he and his elderly staff, all in their 80s, have to improve profits or risk losing their jobs. The harsh reality of conservative and capitalist society collide with the escapist tendencies in one building of the Angelo Hotel as they fight for their survival.