1998 American science fiction film
New Rose Hotel is a 1998 American erotic science fiction drama film co-written and directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento. It is based on William Gibson's 1984 short story of the same name.
Plot
Fox (Walken) and X (Dafoe) are Tokyo-based freelance industrial spies who specialize in helping R&D scientists defect from corporations who would rather see them dead than working for competitors. Fox is obsessed with Dr. Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano), a paradigm-shattering super-genius who works for Maas, the corporation that crippled Fox. Japanese firm Hosaka hires Fox and X to help Hiroshi defect, offering a fee of $50 million. Fox and X hire Sandii (Argento), a small-time nightclub singer and call girl in Shinjuku, to help persuade Hiroshi to defect to a newly-outfitted Hosaka lab in Marrakech.
While training her for the extraction, X falls in love with Sandii, who offers conflicting accounts of her past. Fox and X meet with representatives from Hosaka and negotiate their fee up to $100 million. Sandii meets Hiroshi in Vienna and persuades him to leave his wife and defect to Hosaka. Fox then travels to Marrakech to await Hiroshi's arrival, and X arranges to spend a night with Sandii in Berlin before her rendezvous in Marrakech.
Sandii proposes that she and X leave Fox, marry, and live together. X offers to discuss it after Sandii visits Marrakech.That night, while Sandii sleeps, X rummages through her personal effects, finding cash, information about her aliases, and an unmarked computer chip.
Hosaka transfers the agreed-upon $100 million fee. Fox returns from Marrakech, and X informs him that he will be meeting Sandii in Shinjuku to start a new life with her, a plan that Fox begrudgingly accepts. Later, Fox and X celebrate the success of the operation and their newfound wealth with a group of prostitutes. The next day, X's contact in Marrakech informs him that Hosaka has relocated many of their top scientists to the new lab in Marrakech, a move that Fox decries as unsafe but potentially lucrative for him and X, despite X's insistence that he is finished with the case.
During the night, X's Marrakech contact informs him that somebody discreetly reprogrammed the lab's DNA synthesizer to spread a virus that killed everyone, including Hiroshi, and that Sandii has vanished. X also discovers that the bank account holding the $100 million has been wiped out. Fox tells him that Maas must have recruited Sandii in Vienna and ordered her to kill Hosaka's scientists in Marrakech, and that Hosaka, presuming that Fox and X were part of the conspiracy, has wiped their account and will send agents to eliminate them. After being surrounded by Hosaka agents in a department store, Fox leaps to his death. X flees to a run-down capsule hotel called the New Rose Hotel. There, he reflects on his time with Fox and Sandii and views footage of Sandii using the unmarked computer chip in the DNA synthesizer in Marrakech to kill Hosaka's scientists. Knowing that Hosaka agents will hunt him wherever he goes, X contemplates suicide before masturbating to the memory of his last night with Sandii.
Production
Edward R. Pressman had owned the film rights to New Rose Hotel since the late 1980s. Before Ferrara got involved, Kathryn Bigelow was originally set to direct.[2]
Zoë Tamerlis Lund wrote the first draft of the script in 1996.[3]
According to Ferrara, both Virginie Ledoyen and Chloë Sevigny were considered for the role of Sandii. Ferrara also claims that Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the role of Fox.[4]
Asia Argento made a documentary about Ferrara, titled Abel/Asia (1998), during the making of the film.[4][5]
Ferrara said he fired a lot of the crew members of the film; some of them were longtime collaborators of Ferrara's, such as film composer Joe Delia.[4]
Release
The film opened October 1, 1999 at the Cinema Village Triplex in New York City and grossed $5,147 in its opening weekend and $21,521 in total.[1][6]
Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 24%, based on 17 reviews, with an average rating of 4.2/10.[7] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 31 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[8]
