Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lost Girls & Love Hotels’ on Hulu, A Meditation On Loneliness & Love

In Lost Girls & Love Hotels (Hulu), Alexandra Daddario is living fatalistically, drinking heavily and engaging in empty hedonism. She thinks she’s incapable of love, so loneliness will have to do. “I think I’m destined to go nuts,” she tells a friend in a quiet moment of lucidity. “And I think it’s happening right now.” A random hookup brings with it sudden promise, but also the assurance of even more mental anguish.

LOST GIRLS & LOVE HOTELS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Margaret (Alexandra Daddario) is adrift. She lives alone in Kyoto, Japan, where her day job is teaching English at a school for young women who are preparing to be flight attendants. But this isn’t english as a second language. As she tells her drinking buddies and fellow ex-patriots Ines (Carice van Houten) and Liam (Andrew Rothney) at their dive bar hangout, she really just pronounces English for the students. And it’s not even really a job, because Margaret’s true pursuit is getting totally hammered, smoking hundreds of cigarettes, and engaging in meaningless hookups with strange men at love hotels. Margaret likes to be tied up; it’s the only way to feel anything.

After another round of wee hours drunkenness and random love hotel fatalism, Margaret shows up to work late, drained, and likely still drunk. School mistress Nakamura (Misuzu Kanno) disciplines her, but also has pity for her plight, an unmarried woman scattering stones on the path of life. Margaret promises to do better, but she’s hitting it hard again the very next evening. An opportunity for change arrives when she randomly meets the handsome, swarthy Kazu (Takehiro Hira). They go to a love hotel, too, and the handcuffs come out, but this time it’s different. “How do you know I’m not a bad man?” Kazu asks as he locks her wrists above her head. “I don’t,” Margaret says, and yet they both understand this connection is more powerful than anything either of them have felt for a long, long time.

Kazu is yakuza, and saddled with an arranged marriage inside the gangster life. (His father is the big boss of “the family business.”) Margaret continues to meet with Kazu despite learning all of this, and even skips out on work to travel with him to a buddhist temple in the shadow of Mount Fuji. But when Kazu suddenly ghosts her, Margaret’s last few tethers to the straight and narrow are loosed, and she’s fired and evicted in short order before descending into a destructive tailspin of booze, illicit trysts, and wandering the streets. Can Kazu save her before she gets really hurt? Can anyone?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The beats of Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation drift in here and there in Lost Girls & Love Hotels, though the films take different tracks to resolution. With its simmering eroticism and gazing at the why’s and how’s of humanity’s capacity for love (and the fractures that occur), there are echoes, too, of Mike Nichols’ Closer.

Performance Worth Watching: Once she’s hit rock bottom, Alexandra Daddario plays Margaret with a dazed, unfocused stare, her skin pallid underneath shapeless clothes. Daddario manages to clue us in to a time previous, a time when Margaret perhaps wasn’t so fatalistic, and that promise shimmers behind this strung out, frazzled version of her that is walking to nowhere through the desolate nocturnal city.

Memorable Dialogue: “I came to Japan to be alone,” Margaret tells Kazu in a crowded izakaya, where a drunken group of salarymen jostle them. “Sometimes being alone isn’t about people.” But when Margaret returns from the restroom, the izakaya is silent, and the salarymen are gone. Kazu, quiet and self-contained, offers her a thin smile. “Sometimes alone is about people.” The audience saw Kazu leaning on the mens’ table — he presumably showed them a yakuza tattoo or 20.

Sex and Skin: Margaret engages in meaningless hookups with numerous men, but her moments with Kazu in the love hotels are instead full of sensuality and palpable desire.

Our Take: Lost Girls & Love Hotels is a meditation on loneliness, and the countless forms it takes. Margaret didn’t run to Japan to find herself — she went there to lose herself, and be anonymous in everything from her job to her clothes to her physical desires. The expats she drinks with are thrown together as foreigners and English speakers — a group self-isolating as they self-medicate, to the point that when one of them brings in a girlfriend, it’s a corrupting factor for their little crew. They were drinking in their loneliness, despite the camaraderie. And Kazu, slated to marry not for love but for loyalty to his yakuza masters, is isolated inside the structures and rituals of his gangster sect. He feels alive with Margaret, but they’re both living on stolen moments, and around the bend is more loneliness. Even Margaret’s boss at the flight attendant’s school is lonely, an unmarried woman in her late thirties in a society that frowns on women choosing a career over marital union. And finally there’s the city of Kyoto itself — not the flash and vigor of teeming modern Tokyo, but a gray smudge of metro tracks, narrow alleys, faceless postmodern architecture, and out-of-the-way bars and restaurants horned into nooks and crannies. If Margaret came to Japan to be alone, she found the right town.

Our Call: STREAM IT. With strong performances from Alexandra Daddario and Takehiro Hira at its center, Lost Girls & Love Hotels is a quiet, studied film that ruminates over isolation, reckless abandon, and the many ways we manage to become lonely, stay lonely, or even try and fail to outrun the lonely.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Lost Girls & Love Hotels on Hulu