Cinema Canada (Mar-Apr 1975)

125 Rooms of Comfort A long review of a film you'll probably never get to see. In Canada we probably see a far larger number of First Features than do the devotees of cinema in other countries. There are relatively few established directors, and, given the scarcity of work being produced, we take more notice of first efforts than might otherwise be the case. This situation has its positive side: we have the opportunity to watch a film-maker’s career from its very outset, often from his or her earliest shorts. But it may also mean that we bring our heaviest critical guns to bear on quite tentative works. Few directors launch themselves into features with a major achievement. Those who do — Jutra, Almond, Shebib — usually have a lot of experience in non-feature work, although occasionally a _ virtual beginner will undertake a manageable story and make a sturdy, sensitive work out of it, as witness The Hard Part Begins, directed by Paul Lynch. But Patrick Loubert has bitten off rather more than he can chew. Only a very experienced director could realize a successful film out of the raw material behind 125 Rooms of Comfort, and watching Loubert’s effort one recognizes again how terribly hard it is to make a movie. Not that he has anything to be ashamed of; 125 Rooms is serious, honest, difficult, and has some fine things in it. Its shortcomings are not those sins of vulgarity, stupidity, and pretentiousness that have earned years of purgatory for the makers of some much more expensive projects (supply appropriate titles for yourself). Aware of its weaknesses, the film comes equipped with a defensive rationalization, viz. that the script was sent back two or three times by the C.F.D.C. for re-working, and that its final state represents the uneasily combined work of several hands. The original story, we are told, focussed upon Leo Basho (played by, and to some extent based upon, Toronto performer Les Barker), a _ night-club comedian who visits the Grand Hotel in St. Thomas, Ontario for a professional engagement which turns out to be the job of hosting a stag 58 Cinema Canada FILITYI REVIEWS evening for the guys from a nearby factory. In the finished film, Basho’s role is secondary to that of Billy Joyce, a burned-out ex-rock-singer whose father, recently dead, used to own the Grand Hotel. An aggressive, young, self-made American, Oscar Kidd, is negotiating with the manager and part-owner, McKeaghan, to buy the hotel, and Billy has been summoned from the Mental hospital to sign the necessary papers. Wrought up to a highly excitable state, Billy resorts again to the drag-queen costume in which (as flashbacks show) he had scandalized everyone at his father’s funeral, and is brutally attacked by patrons of the stag evening. Finding the young man in a side alley, Oscar Kidd deliberately lets him die, in order to simplify his business deal. In recognition of the fact that these two stories don’t have much organic connection, the film-makers are now tending to emphasize as protagonist the hotel itself — hence the latest of several titles — and to suggest that the action is a metaphorical rendering of U.S. Imperialism in Canada. Now it must be extremely irksome to have a government agency ordering artistic changes as a precondition for funding, and its right to this kind of intervention is certainly debatable. But I will suggest the possibility that in this case the C.F.D.C. was justified in demanding re-writes, and should be condemned not for deflowering the original script, but for failing to insist upon its further development. (Slogan: Otto Lang for Sec. of State; prevent cinematic abortions!) 125 Rooms of Comfort may well have been finalized at a really inopportune moment. It has been pulled from the shape of its original, but perhaps rather thin and undramatic conception, and never organically recreated around a new centre. It is because the film has come adrift in this way, that it lacks a sure principle of coherence. It is structurally unsound, as any construct must be when its engineers cannot locate the centre of gravity. Lacking such coherence, it is difficult (pursuing the mechanical metaphor) to decide where the stresses should fall, what parts of the structure are load-bearing, and how they are to be connected. Essentially there is no positive reason for combining Leo Basho and Billy Joyce into the same action — hence the rather desperate ruse of hiding the stories behind the facade of the hotel itself. As for the notion that the film works as a metaphor of American domination — that is surely wishful thinking. True, there are some suggestive possibilities: the Canadian characters are all, in their various ways, crippled by the strains of trying to ward off hostility and win approval. The tired comedian, the conciliatory hotel manager, and the freaked-out singer all go to pieces in the face of the hard American buyer. And is Billy’s transvestism an image of the total “feminization” of the son and heir of the Canadian mansion, an expression of an unconscious desire to be raped? This might be very challenging stuff, and it points towards a daring and sophisticated work. But without asking that the film become either a symbol-equation or a political thesis (depending on the direction of development), one must insist that clearer analysis would have made this element of the script more potent, and would have distinguished the dialectically relevant images from the trivially distracting. In this way, 125 Rooms could have been like some of those Quebec films in which the condition and behaviour of the leading female character stand in a real sense for La Belle Province in her dealings with the men who variously exploit and liberate “*her”’. Given this confusion in the script, it must have been difficult for the actors to understand their roles. Les Barker evinces an intelligent awareness of the pathos of his type, and gives a performance with real inwardness. But Tim Henry seemed not to have had the internal coherence of his rote as the transvestite explained to him — probably because the writer-director was none too clear about it either. A rather perfunctory flashback hints that Billy’s father, who looks like an amalgam of Burl Ives and Col. Sanders, implanted in the boy a sex-role identification with his dead mother. But for the most part Tim Henry clumps around in a long dress, without knowing or feeling why. Almost inevitably, the not-fully