A movie set in a love hotel, but without a single sex scene? A 59-year-old woman as the heroine? It's hard to imagine that particular pitch loosening purse strings at major Japanese media companies. A fatally ill teenager? That's more like it.
Director Izuru Kumasaka has incorporated these and other decidedly uncommercial elements into debut feature "Park and Love Hotel" (titled "Asyl" — short for "Asylum" — internationally), which won the Best First Feature Award at this year's Berlin Film Festival. So small miracles do happen, though Kumasaka had an angel in the form of the Pia Film Festival, which gave him a scholarship that included backing for "Park and Love Hotel" for winning three awards in its 2005 edition with his short film "Tea and Milk (Kocha to Milk)."
Kumasaka, who also wrote the script, has made "Park and Love Hotel" a typical Japanese indie film in everything from its deliberate pace and absence of plot to its darkish, grainy visual texture. Instead of two hours of typical indie tedium, however, he has given us four women dealing with loss and loneliness, as well as questions of meaning and purpose, that all are memorably individual and vital. Their drama unfolds in a space that looks like a fantasy at first glance, but comes to feel real — or at least realizable. Their stories may not always have neat endings, but their various epiphanies have a piquant rightness. Though not upbeat in any formulaic way, the film gives off a warm, almost paradisical, glow.