The most sexually explicit film at Cannes “would never be shown in American cinemas because there is so much fear and risk there”

Anyone looking for a libido kick at this year’s Cannes Film Festival will certainly find it in “Motel Destino,” the sexually explicit erotic thriller by Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz.

After “Invisible Life” and “Firebrand,” Aïnouz is back in the main competition, returning to his native Brazil to shoot this perverse psychosexual love triangle about the owners of a sex motel on the country’s northeast Atlantic coast and the criminal drifter who turns their lives upside down. Wild-haired Dayana (Nataly Rocha) runs the Destino motel with her abusive husband Elias (Fábio Assunção), where she begins a mad affair with Heraldo (Iago Xavier) and, while sucking and fucking nonstop, plots to kill Elias in the grand tradition of the great noirs. Except it’s a noir with a post-Hays Code angle that rocked Cannes with its strong, pervasive sexual content, to use the language of the American Motion Picture Association’s ratings committee.

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Despite the film’s anarchic sexual energy and unbridled nudity, Aïnouz insists to IndieWire that Brazil is open to such a release and will not face censorship. “It’s the country in the world with the biggest gay pride parade and also the country in the world with the (highest) number of hate murders, so it’s really contradictory,” Aïnouz said. “Legally, I don’t think there’s anything that would stop this film (from being released in theaters) – it’s probably rated 18 because it contains drugs, sex and rock’n’roll. Not rock’n’roll, but whatever that’s called, techno. I think we’ll probably get an 18 or higher rating, but I don’t think there’s anything that would stop us from showing the film or that I’d have to make a less explicit version.” “Motel Destino” is currently seeking distributors worldwide.

“This film is really inspired by a tradition of films from the 1970s called pornochanchada. These were porn comedies. That’s how Sonia Braga became very famous,” he said. “It has a long tradition in this country. Even though there is more conservatism today because of religion, I think it’s still pretty irrelevant how much sexuality there is in it.”

When I said that Motel Destino was certainly the most sexually explicit film in this year’s Cannes competition, Aïnouz said: “Thank you. That’s good.” Did he want to take sex on screen to the extreme here in a Brazilian production, because it is absent almost everywhere else?

“My question is, ‘Why not?'” he said. “I really miss it, and I’ll tell you why. I really looked at the late, early ’80s. The other day was the anniversary of Studio 54. I love those really wild and crazy ’80s movies by Brian De Palma, and also like (Lawrence Kasdan’s) ‘Body Heat’ and (De Palma’s) ‘Body Double’ and all that kind of neo-noir that they launched. I thought, wow, we don’t make movies like that anymore. Not that they’re the best movies in the world, but it’s a really interesting tradition because the body is very present. It’s not totally explicit, but there’s a sense of freedom.”

Aïnouz said the trend toward sexlessness on screen is not just because “we’ve become more conservative.” Although he made “Motel Destino” after Brazil’s Workers’ Party President Lula da Silva defeated far-right Jair Bolsonaro in the 2023 elections, the screenplay was co-written in 2016 with Mauricio Zacharias (who also wrote Ira Sachs’ explicit gay love triangle “Passages” last year) and Wislan Esmeraldo.

“When AIDS started, so right at the end of that era (of films like ‘Body Double’), sexuality became something that was very strongly linked to death,” said Aïnouz, who is queer. “Even though we’re past the peak of the AIDS crisis, there’s a combination of sexuality and death, but also a sense of conservatism. When you were a big Hollywood star — with the exception of Demi Moore, which was also very interesting — there were very, very, very few films that weren’t about sex, but about intimacy. Sex is one of the few moments when you’re actually completely intimate with another person. There were a few decades when it wasn’t on screen, in some ways because of the star system, but also because of AIDS. Pornography is one thing. Pornography is sex for someone else, and (‘Motel Destino’) is sex between characters. There’s no way to get a better insight into your characters when they’re having sex.”

Aïnouz, who shot the film in the coastal state of Ceará, his first Brazilian production in five years, said: “On the one hand, it was: ‘Let’s just burn the house down.’ On the other hand, it’s part of something that’s coming back. I don’t think this is the only film – maybe the only film on the Croisette – that’s doing that to the extent that I’m doing it… It’s also something that would never happen in American cinemas because there’s so much fear and risk involved. It’s also a question of an industry where it’s not a matter of life and death.”

In her opinion, the pressure from Brazilian box offices, which provide subsidies for filming, is not as great as in the USA, says Aïnouz: “If you make a film that doesn’t have to recoup its own money, you have a lot more freedom.”

But in a new American tradition that Europeans and filmmakers elsewhere tend to scoff at, Aïnouz hired an intimacy coordinator, Roberta Serrado, for the wild, unbridled sex scenes in Motel Destino. Filming took place in a real hotel – which the team transformed into a garish, spectacular hideout for the characters’ desires, teeming with equatorial heat – after a thorough casting search involving hundreds upon hundreds of potential actors. None of them were put off by the prospect of sex and nudity on screen.

“There’s a sense of excess throughout the film that I didn’t want to control. I just left it like that. I know it’s excessive, but I just left it like that. It was like making a first film all over again,” he said.

Aïnouz had already worked with an intimacy coordinator at last year’s Cannes premiere of “Firebrand,” which was shot in Britain. The film is about the relationship between Henry VIII (Jude Law) and his last wife Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander). That “was the first time I was confronted with (an intimacy coordinator),” the director said. “I had a lot of doubts because she’s that person between you and your actor, and the relationship between you and your actor has to be deeply based on trust. We had (an intimacy coordinator on ‘Motel Destino’). At the beginning I was very reluctant… She was great. She’s not an American intimacy coordinator. She’s a Brazilian intimacy coordinator. She had really interesting ideas about choreography of the bodies… it was more about them having someone to talk to if there was a breakdown at some point.”

Intimacy coordinators remain a topic of debate in Hollywood. While Cannes jury president Greta Gerwig praised their role at the opening press conference (saying it was “part of building a safe environment”), Michael Douglas recently described intimacy coordinators as an attempt by those in charge to “take control away from the filmmakers.”

“Although I never imagined doing something like this, a lot of other people have,” Aïnouz said. “Sometimes I get really angry, wondering why I have to pay the price for something I never did?”, referring to how widespread abuse on set in Hollywood spurred the need for intimacy coordinators in the first place. “There’s a certain level of historical reparation that’s important… The industry in the U.S. and in the English-speaking world has committed so many crimes that I think there’s a moment when that’s kind of necessary. It really depends on the person.”

“Motel Destino” premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The film is currently being distributed in the United States.

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