Two harrowing sexual assaults occur in the first 15 minutes of “Love Hotel,” a 1985 erotic drama from the cult director Shinji Somai. First, Tetsuro (Minori Terada), a flailing Tokyo businessman in debt to the yakuza, is forced to stand by while his wife, Ryoko (Kiriko Shimizu), is raped by a mob loan shark. Later, in a twisted bid at reclaiming some agency, Tetsuro hires Yumi (Noriko Hayami), a sex worker, plotting to kill her and himself. He assaults her savagely, but doesn’t carry out his plan, instead leaving Yumi naked and chained to the bed at a love hotel.
Nothing else in the film matches the shock of these acts of violence, captured unflinchingly in static shots and gliding pans. Their memory, however, lingers throughout and infects this human drama of romantic disillusionment and sexuality warped by trauma with serious feel-bad vibes occasionally tempered by mordant humor.
Some years later, the two reconnect — on radically different footings — when Yumi, who works at a publishing house (and is now known by her real name, Nami), hops into the cab Tetsuro is driving.
There’s a lot more sex, too. “Love Hotel” is one of the best-known entries in the roman porno subgenre, a kind of elevated skinflick developed by financially strained film studios in Japan in the 1970s meant to entice audiences looking for quality and coitus.
It’s also something of an outlier in Somai’s filmography (he was best known for his dark coming-of-age tales, like “Typhoon Club,” 1985). Yet his exquisite visual compositions (of lonely bedrooms, concrete piers, and nocturnal courtyards) infuse even the film’s racy images with a somber sense of longing and introspection, finding beauty and humanity in the midst of the macabre.
Love Hotel
Not rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters.