AN ECONOMY OF PERFORMATIVE PRESENCES By Filipe Furtado (New Rose Hotel, 1998, Cinématographe)

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When New Rose Hotel premiered, Abel Ferrara was at the end of a very impressive run. These were the years when he was furthest from the margins of American film culture, working with stars and at least something of a budget, heir to a tradition of Italian American filmmakers and pushing his films in a rawer direction. Comparisons with Martin Scorsese, which people would rarely make now, used to pop up somewhat regularly. Kent Jones, in a 1994 article for Lingo Magazine (the earliest stab at dealing with Ferrara's body of work that I know of), put the relationship in clear terms with an anecdote: it seems the previous year Ferrara was a last minute replacement for Scorsese, speaking at a film preservation gala, and, frustrated with the wealthy patrons' refusal to pay attention, threw out a "Can everybody just fuck shut the fuck up?" on his way towards being thrown out of the party. A very Ferrara story to be sure, and one that illustrates his signature bluntness, chasing the meat of whatever he sets out to do, with no time for the kinds of niceties someone who knows how to be a player learns to negotiate.

Back in the 1990s, though, people did make the Scorsese connection, the idea being that Ferrara was a hard-edged post-New Hollywood filmmaker making artsy genre movies that could be uncomfortable while still in dialogue with what was going on more generally. This state of affairs more or less ended with 1998's New Rose Hotel, Ferrara's great film maudit. Just two years prior, Ferrara made The Funeral, a decadent gangster story centered on three doomed criminal brothers; the film had the kind of Viscontian feeling that was common amongst his generational peers. While fairly good, The Funeral is arguably the least interesting among the eight features Ferrara made between King of New York (1990) and New Rose Hotel, while pointing in a direction Ferrara's career might have taken if he had a more promising temperament. The Funeral also marked the end of his long partnership with screenwriter Nicholas St. John and, with it, the more overt presence of Catholicism in his work. The tension between belief and a very materialistic world would remain pivotal in Ferrara's films, but Christian imagery would come and go (most notably in Mary, a movie concerned with religious faith in crisis). New Rose Hotel suggested Ferrara was embarking on a different kind of exploration, even if its corporate intrigue and thriller trappings belonged to a more genre-bound film than most of his 21st-century work.

When producer Edward R. Pressman (who had worked with Ferrara on Bad Lieutenant in 1992) first bought the rights for William Gibson's short story, the intentions for New Rose Hotel were very different. The idea was to turn Gibson's tale of shady commercial machinations into an action movie (there was even the talk of getting Arnold Schwarzenegger, an insane proposition considering the eventual movie). Pressman brought Kathryn Bigelow on board (he produced her Blue Steel), and she and Gibson worked on multiple drafts of the script to open up the story and add action to it. Brad Stevens, author of the Ferrara critical study The Moral Vision, wrote that many of the ideas in those early drafts show up in Bigelow's later Strange Days, a very different kind of 1990s science fiction flop-turned-cult favorite. Ferrara and screenwriter Christ Zois went back to Gibson's short story and not only kept most of the original spirit, but also refused to expand it. Ferrara's version has a plenty of plot, but very few things actually happen onscreen; most of the narrative remains implied and discussed, with off-screen actions appearing on monitors. The majority of the film consists of the three leads in hotel rooms and bars. I'm sure Pressman and his wallet appreciated Ferrara's frugality. The focus is almost entirely on how the actors perform—particularly Asia Argento's call girl turned corporate spy—and how others observe them. The intrigue becomes a series of behavioral tics and whether or not they are properly interpreted.

One of the many pleasures of New Rose Hotel is the way the movie conjures a world from very little. The glut of 1990s cyberpunk movies used the genre as a springboard for great production design showreels, resulting in movies with wonderful sets and FX work that lured audiences in. They tended to make their worlds further from our own, while Ferrara brings that of his film closer. New Rose Hotel takes place in an alternate, decadent, and paranoid world, but one that feels very recognizable, an intensified version of our own hellscape. The combination of consistent downbeat mood with anonymous sets adds to the overall texture of grim familiarity. New Rose Hotel is one of the least fanciful cyberpunk movies, but it feels similar to reading some of the genre's better writing. What Ferrara presents is a very ugly vision of the 21st century as imagined at the turn of the millennium, a world that his movie clearly abhors and whose power struggles it can only observe from a distance. It is a vision that has aged depressingly well in the 27 years since.

Key to this is sticking so close to the nameless narrator's point of view. Willem Dafoe's X is simultaneously aware of what the major corporate players are doing, yet clueless. He is close enough to power to think he knows everything yet remains devoid of any power of his own, a small cog in a much larger conspiracy. The movie is very disciplined in building its world around him; for a few moments (the early scene in the club, the big executive meeting), he plays second fiddle to Christopher Walken's Fox, his talkative partner in crime and a much more exuberant figure, but the film stays tethered to his perspective. Dafoe's performance contains many wonders, but it is most impressive in the way, for the movie's first hour, he portrays his nameless lead as very certain of his position, while his body language remains very small. He is smug but always on the verge of disappearing into the anonymous sets. The scene near the end in which the corporate stooges chase Dafoe and Walken comes as a shock in that it even acknowledges action on a larger scale. Ferrara uses casting shorthand: Walken's presence certainly applies, but so do the many cameos by actors he'd previously worked with (Victor Argo, Annabella Sciorra, Gretchen Mol) and Ryuichi Sakamoto in the role of an executive, and even more so the constant presence of visual artist Yoshitaka Amano on the monitors as Hiroshi, the scientist on whom the action verges. New Rose Hotel's use of Japan as this capitalism's last frontier is the aspect that most clearly dates it to the 1990s.

New Rose Hotel shares a lot in common with Ferrara's first writing collaboration with psychiatrist Christ Zois, 1997's The Blackout. Compared with his work with Nicholas St. John, these new films take place in purgatories that remain more immediate and less allegorical. Their worlds are always near dissolving while suggesting the experiences of addiction in The Blackout and power games in Hotel. These are very subjective films, tied to the perceptions of men who are ultimately just passengers of their self-destructive desires. Everything around them remains very fragile, and in different ways, the movies move toward a total breakdown—something New Rose Hotel makes even more radical by keeping Gibson's final retrospective moment intact and focused on what it means for the character more than for the machinations of the by-then rendered irrelevant plot. They are also very dependent on what Matthew Modine's movie star in The Blackout and Dafoe's spy project on the women around them, and if New Rose Hotel is the richer film, that has a lot to do with Asia Argento's performance and the way in which the movie allows her to remain autonomous beyond what X sees. The shadow of Vertigo hangs over the two movies, more openly acknowledged in The Blackout and implied in Hotel. This influence shows in the ways they deal with making and watching movies, and Hotel remains one of the nastier riffs on Hitchcock's masterpiece regarding its wounded male perspective.

New Rose Hotel is presented as a mirror to the spectator. Most of what we expect the movie to be about, such as what the proposed Bigelow version would focus on, is kept carefully off-screen. We watch characters watching the story unfolding. Our eyes remain focused on their reactions. No wonder the presence of monitors is so crucial to the film. The very first shots are of Dafoe watching footage of the scientist and his wife, and the film ends with him as the ultimate spectator, rewatching the movie we followed for the first hour or so with us. He goes through every moment he and Argento shared onscreen, trying to parse her betrayal, every gesture ready to be explored and analyzed again. He is a film consumer lost in the many possibilities her playacting offers, looking for reassurance that he wasn't just a patsy all along. The entire movie is about this arrangement, of Dafoe watching Argento; the final scenes only radicalize it further, letting the movie turn in on itself instead of continuing to expand. New Rose Hotel devours itself, its already spartan use of film spectacle exhausted until nothing is left but an open wound. Dafoe and Argento's scenes together are based on an absurd premise—that he has things to teach her when it comes to acting and seduction—that their performances contradict; he is always plain, what we see is what we get, while she remains slippery.

Stevens, in The Moral Vision, connects Argento's work in Hotel to Marlene Dietrich's films with Josef Von Sternberg. The comparison has its limits: Sternberg's camera is far too in awe of Dietrich to allow the male point of view quite as much space, but Argento and the German icon do share a similar awareness of how they are watched and the road to perdition they can lead doomed men on.

If the movie is particularly concerned with image consumption, it is also very true to the yearning expressed in Dafoe's final scenes at the hotel. New Rose Hotel takes place in a world whose frame of reference seems to increasingly lose authenticity; everything is dissimulation, a performance to better fit whoever is watching's desires. From the first frame on, public existence is a matter of putting on a show, a series of displays mediated by a couple of corporations that are indistinguishable from each other. Hiroshi, the man whose lust and whims our three main characters depend upon, remains an image on a screen, flat and hollowed out, devoid of any interiority, completely discarded by the end of the film, just another pawn to be used as a sleight of hand by power players we barely understand. The film feels more and more desperate, hungry for a little reality that can serve as an alternative to this depressing world. The bodies onscreen, deceptive as they might be, offer the only possibility of that something real.

Ferrara's 1990s work is an exemplar of exploratory acting. His role as the filmmaker often seems to be setting things in motion so that the performers can find new behavioral ideas. Dangerous Game, Ferrara's film most directly concerned with filmmaking, deals very explicitly with this. In Stevens' book, Asia Argento talks about making New Rose Hotel as a radical break in her career, offering her a degree of freedom to create that she knew would be hard to find again. The three main actors are incredible, each in a different register. Walken's performance, for instance, is all externalized, a series of dance moves made by a man that has nothing to hide. Ferrara's approach to actors has always been very action-oriented, providing a series of tasks to be performed onscreen; Hotel focuses on the ways everyone reads everyone else, so a lot of what matters in the movie is conveyed only through body language. What is said takes a backseat to how people act while saying it.

New Rose Hotel represents both an end to the work Ferrara focused on in the 1990s as well as the start of his late career, symbolized, in part, by it being his last movie with Walken, after a very rewarding four-movie partnership, and his first with Dafoe, a close friend and collaborator who more than anyone else would come to embody Ferrara's later period through five more films. The two would work together on Go Go Tales, a movie set inside a strip club with Dafoe as a very Ferrara-like master of ceremonies (with, notably, Argento as his most memorable dancer) which often echoes many of New Rose Hotel's concerns about performance, desire, and capital, if far more explicitly.

When Go Go Tales debuted at Cannes in the Directors' Fortnight section nine years after New Rose Hotel premiered at Venice, it was received as a bit of a comeback, with much warmer reviews. Between being far more direct and featuring a group of artists taking pleasure in putting on a show, it made for a more digestible movie. Back in 1998, New Rose Hotel, with its spare narrative and often alienating effects (despite plenty of underlying desperate emotion), was not the movie people expected from either its filmmaker or its genre. The initial reception was among the most hostile I remember such a great movie receiving on its release. There were exceptions—a well-known article on the relationship between Ferrara and Simone Weil written by Tag Gallagher for the online journal Screening the Past, and a very positive appraisal by Emmanuel Burdeau for Cahiers du Cinéma—but I always remember something the great Amy Taubin wrote for the Village Voice: "What's on the screen is so dreadful that it inspires the ontological question 'What are films, and why is this not one of them?'"

I'd love to say I loved New Rose Hotel when I saw it as a high schooler who was very into Ferrara crime movies in 1999, but I remember being mostly dumbfounded by it. The film had some harsh images that were very seductive and a downbeat atmosphere that was appealing, but mostly I remember thinking, when Dafoe reached the New Rose Hotel, "Did Ferrara run out of money?" I'm sure plenty of critics that had far more experience than a 17-year-old probably didn't react all that differently. I recount all this to reinforce that New Rose Hotel was an unusually forward-looking movie at the time of its release. There are any number of turn-of-the-millennium anxiety texts from the 1990s, not all of them dystopic or science fiction, but very few have aged as gracefully as New Rose Hotel. The combination of Ferrara's intuitive instincts, Gibson's original story, and the right group of actors was not only refreshing in 1998, but is still so today. If the film feels recovered now, or at the least beloved by certain strands of cinephilia and celebrated as one of the filmmaker's higher peaks, maybe the highest, it is because its desperate vision nails something very specific: We are all still stuck in this near economy of elusive and performative presences, in a world dissolving, hoping to reach something real.

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Filipe Furtado is a film critic and former editor of Brazilian magazines Cinética and Paísà. He has contributed to international magazines like The Film Journal, La Furia Umana, Lumière, Rouge and Sight and Sound. He keeps the blog Anotações de um Cinéfilo.