Karim Aïnouz is not quite the man you would expect from intense, visceral films such as Madame Satã, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão or, most particularly, the sordidly incoming Motel Destino. That is a silly thing to say. Many are the horror directors who chortle over hot chocolate. The Dardenne brothers make harrowing social-realist films, but you won’t meet two jollier fellows.
Anyway, the Brazilian film-maker turns out to be endlessly good company. Round-faced, grey-bearded, he takes any opportunity to rattle out a good yarn. I note that he has long been resident in Berlin and make some highfalutin noises about the cultural richness of that city.
“No, for me I think it’s the parties. I am going to be very upfront with you,” he says with a laugh. “I love going out, even if I don’t go out as much as I want to any more. I love the sense of Bohemia of the city, the sense of freedom. I’ve been coming here since the 1980s – in the time of the Wall. Then I came in the 1990s. I feel I live in what I dreamed the future would be. It’s really inclusive. It’s a really mixed neighbourhood. It’s a really funky city.”
I wonder about the contrast with Brazil. Aïnouz, who was raised in the northeast of the country, said recently that he left because of the homophobia, the sense of feeling “marginal”. That was back in the 1980s. There has been a great deal of social ebb and flow since then.
“It has changed since I left when I was 18,” he says. “It is too a very homophobic environment in the country. But I find it’s funny, because it’s the country with the biggest gay pride in the world. So, you know, it’s complicated. We have the best and the worst of both worlds.”
The child of a scientist mum and an engineer dad, he first studied architecture but then drifted towards the less practical arts. As anyone who saw Walter Salles’ recent I’m Still Here will understand, Brazil went through huge traumas during the military dictatorship that lasted from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s.
“I’m from a generation that was raised and became adolescent just after the military left,” Aïnouz says. “There was this sense of taking back the country. So politics was a big part of my upbringing after the age of 16.”
Architecture felt like a way of embracing many intersecting cultural disciplines. It seemed “ecumenical”. But Aïnouz didn’t feel wholly fulfilled. He had a go at painting. He then moved towards photography. While dabbling with Super 8mm film cameras, he dived into cinema history and found himself at home.
Then living in New York, he was at the centre of the “new queer cinema” that developed in parallel to the Aids crisis. These were, as he explains, films made with great freedom but with a “strong political will”. He got some work as an assistant editor. He programmed festivals.
“Then I thought, If I make a feature I can make some money,” he says. “It was twofold. It was out of love for the craft. It was also out of understanding that this is a really powerful way of expressing what you’re saying – something that can change the world.”
It’s all sex, violence and tackily damp corridors. Lubricious moaning emerges from every door. Peepholes offer clues as to what goes on within
One of the more unclassifiable careers in world cinema had begun. He co-wrote the social drama Behind the Sun for Salles. Madame Satã, Aïnouz’s debut as director, from 2001, following a cross-dressing cabaret performer in 1930s Rio de Janeiro, kicked up a squall of outrage at Cannes. Suely in the Sky, from 2006, concerned an abandoned wife who put herself up for raffle.
Something like critical breakthrough came, belatedly, with The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, in 2019. An adaptation of a novel by Martha Batalha, the drama followed two sisters as they fought intolerance in the Brazil of the 1950s. The ecstatically reviewed film won top prize at Un Certain Regard in Cannes and confirmed the director as a force.
“I was very surprised,” he says. “I am very proud of An Invisible Life, but it’s a very ‘classic’ movie. It’s so f**king classic. And I don’t think I really chose to do that movie. I think that movie chose me to do it, because it’s a story that was given to me by a really good friend who’s a producer. It’s a very thin book, and I loved the book. It was the time that I was losing my mom. And it was really shocking, the similarities with her story.”
I want to go back and ponder how he feels the world engages with gay cinema. Alisa Lebow, interviewing Aïnouz for Film Quarterly in 2022, noted that, at the Cannes premiere of Madame Satã, “half of the audience walked out, incensed by a tensely homoerotic sex scene.” Sorry? What? At Cannes? In the 21st century (albeit only just)?
“Cannes is very heterosexual, you know,” Aïnouz says. “It’s a straight man running the show. It has always been. It’s the film industry. That’s why these festivals – queer festivals, these gay festivals – that I had done before needed to exist.”
He had, indeed, between a director of New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, aka Mix NYC, when he lived in the city. One of his first decisions was to bring that programme to Brazil.
“That was really exciting. It was 1993. But it was the first openly queer festival there. And it was quite violent as well, but it was really exciting at the end of the day.”
As if to deliberately confound any attempt at simplistic categorisation, Aïnouz followed up the Invisible Life triumph with the sort of entertainment BBC Two might have screened on a Sunday evening in 1978. Firebrand, his first film in the main Cannes competition, from 2023, starred Alicia Vikander and Jude Law in an unthreatening study of Katherine Parr’s conflict with Henry VIII.
A year later, as Motel Destino premiered, at least one critic wondered if a director had ever offered two more contrasting films in successive races for the Palme d’Or. The film stars Iago Xavier as a reluctant hoodlum who, after retiring to the titular establishment for a one-night stand, wakes up with no money and nowhere else to escape circling danger.
It’s all sex, violence and tackily damp corridors. Lubricious moaning emerges from every door. Peepholes offer clues as to what goes on within. “A romantic triangle that plays like James M Cain with sex toys,” Justin Chang wrote in the New Yorker. Which sounds about right.
“I spent a lot of time in motels,” Aïnouz says when I ask about the location. “That’s where we used to go when I was younger to have sex and have parties. It’s something that was very much part of Brazilian culture. There was nothing exceptional about it. As in every Catholic country, there’s a huge degree of hypocrisy. So, yeah, this was the place that things were permitted. I always asked myself how come I hadn’t seen a movie shot in this place.”
As we speak Aïnouz is finishing his star-studded next film. Riley Keough, Elle Fanning, Tracy Letts, Pamela Anderson and Jamie Bell feature in an off-centre drama entitled Rosebush Pruning. Efthimis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos’s key collaborator, has written the script. That’s quite a line-up. Mind you, after all his years in the business, I can’t imagine Aïnouz still gets intimidated by celebrity.
“I love being with actors, so I never get really star struck,” he says, chuckling. “Well, I think I got it a couple of times, with a couple of actors that I met. When I met Cate Blanchett I was, like, wow!”
He is practically fanning himself.
“I was such a fan!”
Motel Destino is in cinemas from Friday, May 9th
