I just saw this movie at the Berlin Film Festival and it was one of the disappointments of this year's festival. The movie starts off quite interesting. A young couple ends up at a train station with a bag of a stranger. They decide to take it home with them. Actually they wanted to go on a trip to Venice that day but they finally stay home and explore the bag. It's full of Arabian bank notes and carries a token of a place called '(Ho)tel Harabati'. Now the movie shows that these signs are enough to make the couple suspicious till the edge of paranoia. The paranoia gets worse when the woman picks up photos and finds pictures of Venice mixed with pictures of her and her children. So she gets more and more strange and her distances himself more and more from her. Until here the movie is quite nice, but now she decides to go to "(Ho)tel Harabati" and he follows her. And it turns out that "Hotel Harabati" is actually "Tel Harabati" a beautiful valley where they live happily ever after. And this ending really spoils the film. It's so clischee, that the two Europeans go somewhere, and this somewhere is even shown as a place far from civilization what makes it worse, and find their inner peace and harmony. This break of two parts is even mirrored in the images and the telling of the plot. The images of the first part are interesting and with a great awareness for colors (quite common in french cinema) while the images of Syria are just like in hundreds of other movies. The speed of the story is quite slow from the beginning but for the first three quarters of an hour this is alright, because the characters are really interesting and there are a lot of nice details, but around the half of the movie it really gets long. And longer.
Review of Hotel Harabati
