In André Téchiné’s Hôtel des Amériques (1981), Patrick Dewaere plays Gilles, a Biarritz townie. He idles away the day at the hotel his mother runs in the touristy French beach town and spends his nights carousing and scheming with his troublesome, wannabe musician-friend Bernard (Etienne Chicot). When he meets Helené (Catherine Deneuve), a morose anesthesiologist, he suddenly has a purpose: to penetrate her cold exterior. But the more Helené lets her guard down, revealing the complications of her past and the tragic drowning of her architect husband, Gilles pulls away, becoming bitter and, at times, violent. Their affair is a sort of miserable romantic see-saw that affects everyone around them, casting the sunny beach destination in a perpetual state of gloom.
French films often feature resort towns as the settings for romantic complications—from the tender love triangle of Claude Sautet’s César and Rosalie (1972), to Éric Rohmer’s neurotic and horny holidays in Claire’s Knee (1970) and Pauline at the Beach (1983), to the vicious nihilism of Catherine Breillat’s 36 Fillette (1988) and Fat Girl (2001), to the raw sexuality and danger of Alain Guiradie’s Stranger By the Lake (2013). The French vacation narrative uses the liminality of getaways so that its characters only focus on passionate feelings. Except, there is no getaway in Hôtel des Amériques. Its characters are rooted in Biarritz, unable to leave a place that others pass through in pursuit of pleasure and temporary escape. It is as if the local color of these films moved to the fore. Gilles, Helené, and their circle appear resigned to coming-and-goings; in light of this, Hôtel des Amériques’s drama feels unique in its brooding and fatalism.
The film marks the first collaboration of many between Téchiné and Deneuve, and the first in which the director permitted his actors to improvise. With this film he began to allow the script to change and respond to his performers, Téchiné explained in a book released by Cahiers du Cinema in 1988. "From Hôtel des Amériques onwards my films are no longer genre films," he said. "My inspiration is no longer drawn from the cinema." This new approach emphasizes what makes Téchiné a sensitive film artist who never resorts to sentimental shorthand and is attuned to the finer details of the human condition: what makes Hotel des Ameriques so bracingly effective. There is a shock to its frankness and the frustrating illogic of its characters, particularly Dewaere’s delicately-realized Gilles. But in this web of passions and irrationalities is woven a new realism.
Hôtel des Amériques screens this evening, January 7, at L’Alliance New York as part of the series “The Ballad of Patrick Dewaere.”
