Michael Søndergaard | Hotel Boy / 2018

sometimes politicians lie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tomas Lagermand Lundme (screenplay), Michael Søndergaard (director) Hotel Boy / 2018 [12 minutes]

 

I was almost amused by the naïveté of the young Samir (Youssef Wayne Hvidtfeldt) who has put his entire life aside to in order to join the politician Stefan (Claes Bang) in a Copenhagen Crowne Plaza Towers hotel room in what he was told would be the beginning of a new life. He immediately tries to reconfirm with Stefan as to whether he has told his wife, but gets only a vague assurance that “she knows what she needs to know.”

 

     Samir, as a Dane, perhaps has more faith in politicians than any US citizen might, and although he too wonders what Stefan’s comment might mean, he still believes that the two, after spending a night or so in the hotel, will soon be on their way to a new life. He is convinced of the politician’s good intentions despite the fact that Stefan is evidently in the midst of a new campaign and that he soon receives a call from wife in which the father chats with his daughter reassuring her that he’ll see her soon.

      But it just as quickly becomes clear, at least to savvier viewer, that although Stefan and his wife may have discussed divorce, the full reasons for that divorce have never been revealed, and that Stefan has absolutely no intentions of actually “going off” with the boy.

      As the boy gradually begins to comprehend the situation, realizing like thousands of men and women involved in clandestine affairs with politicians that he has been lied to he desperately seeks to gain control over the situation, attempting to get the attention of the journalist waiting in the rain below to reveal the truth. But, how possibly, even in the far more open-minded Scandinavian country could a man running for office openly admit that his left his wife for a young boy? Stefan quickly stops the boy’s angry gestures by insisting that no news reporter would believe the word of a young boy given the long history of Stefan’s heterosexual involvement with his family.

       Again, things may be different in Denmark, but in the US one might be assured that any journalist waiting below a hotel room in a car might be ready to believe whatever gossip came his or her way. But politicians everywhere, so it appears, have the power to make everyone else believe they have no power whatsoever. And the horrified and frustrated young man must swallow the fact that he will be paid for his services with nothing more to be offered, hardly a shocking revelation except to those thousands of young naifs who believe unquestioningly in the truth of authority.

        Presumably, Samir will never be more than what Danish director Michael Søndergaard describes him as in the film’s title, a “hotel boy,” surely not a major politician’s lover or potential companion.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).