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Well, that last I can sympathize with -- I think much of what impressed me about Hostel was its standing relative to most other contemporary American horror films, and I'm not sure I'd have been as impressed with it had it been, say, Japanese. American horror has been in a pretty sorry state for quite some time, and while it has come a long way toward recapturing its former glory in this decade, there's still way too much hackwork. I don't think Hostel is a hacky film by any means, and Roth is miles ahead of Masters of Schlock like Rob Zombie (who, admittedly, might be capable of making a good movie if someone else were to write a script for him), but...no, he's no Takashi Miike, either, and probably never will be.
I think, though, that it's way too simplistic to dismiss Hostel as being akin to a live-action Maxim spread or what have you...there's no question that the film's first half hour is titillating, and is meant to titillate, but I'd argue that Roth means for us to question the "sympathetic" characters and their motives in the gooshy part of the film, and that this would be impossible had we not first been kids in a candy store right along with them. (Granted, this is a reaction that Roth could likely only get out of men, and maybe even then only slightly immature ones, which is a group that for better or worse probably includes myself -- I think most female viewers are likely to find the doggish leads wholly unsympathetic right from the start, and only sympathetic -- if ever -- when they suffer.)
Now it is possible that I'm giving Roth too much credit, and he really was just putting as much t&a in the film as he possibly could for reasons strictly puerile. That isn't what I got out of it, though. I felt that Roth was drawing a parallel between the protagonists and their tormentors -- both are benefitting from the "perks" of a place where poverty has made life cheap. The protagonists are there in search of easy sex, and the antagonists are there in search of the opportunity to murder without consequences, but both groups are there to exploit people who have been made easy prey by socioeconomic circumstances.
SPOILERS
For those who are really hung up on the idea of Hostel as typical genre piece, I'd suggest you look at the ways in which it subverts the cliche template: significantly, the most sympathetic character (the one who doesn't exploit anybody, and whom the film leads to think will be the main character; a sensitive soul who is basically the gender-bending equivalent of the Last Girl) buys it halfway through, and we're left by process of elimination to identify with an amoral horndog who just might deserve the situation in which he has found himself. After whoring his way across Europe, the line "I got a lot of money for you, and now you are my bitch" sounds a lot like the chickens coming home to roost. If we'd as soon not see him be tortured to death, it's more due to our own squeamishness than to any real sympathy he's generated thus far. He's more than a little like his tormentor, who would as soon not be reminded that the person he's hurting is, you know, a person (witness how uncomfortable he gets from the instant he sees the two women from the hostel in natural light, sans makeup, no longer flirtatiously bubbleheaded but suddenly displaying intelligence and more than a bit of dislike -- they're malevolent, but they also seem much more recognizably human than the centerfold-fantasies-come-to-life they've been thus far). I'm not sure Roth entirely succeeds in making him heroic when he goes back for the screaming woman (the drowning girl story is just a little too pat, and Roth has succeeded a little too well in making the torture chamber a place no sane person would venture into willingly, no matter how much he thought he'd be haunted by a failure to act later), but there is at least an effort toward creating an arc wherein the character goes from shitbaggish exploiter of women to empathetic human being willing to put himself on the line for the sake of one...a much more sophisticated idea than a person who's "good" from the start finally showing what a decent person he is when the chips are down. |
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