Love at the Twilight Motel
- Directed by Alison E. Rose
- Classification: NA
At the busy motels that line a notorious strip in Miami's Little Havana district, rooms are rented by the hour, making them the perfect discreet places for consensual trysts - both professional and personal.
Toronto filmmaker Alison Rose takes us behind closed doors to hear the stories of regular guests in her ironically titled documentary Love at the Twilight Motel, a beautiful looking and sounding meditation on the ache for human connection and the emotional pain so many people try to ease with sex.
Only moderately titillating, the film introduces several male and female characters - most of them middle-aged and many of them Cuban - who, in the first act, give an almost light-hearted "defence" of why they do what they do (the "I love my wife but a man has needs" kind of thing) or describe the elation they felt during early encounters.
But that mood darkens in the second act as Rose digs deeper into her characters' pasts: A man reveals he is a heroin addict and rents rooms not only for casual sex, but to shoot up so he can be "normal" with his wife; a woman talks about her uptight, small-town upbringing and the discovery early in her marriage that her husband was hooking up with male prostitutes, and so on.
While it could have used a narrative device to propel the mostly talking-head material, Love at the Twilight Motel is a thoughtful film that hits raw nerves.
Special to The Globe and Mail