2023-10-06 00:00:00
Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick oppose Hugo Weaving in The Royal Hotel by Kitty Green, with a screenplay adapted from a true story.
We often forget that Australia has a huge desert of brick-colored earth. It is therefore in the middle of nowhere that Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), Canadian travelers whose credit cards are now empty, find themselves. The two young women accept a temporary job as waitresses in a seedy bar where Billy (Hugo Weaving), the boss, is disturbing to say the least, because he is openly misogynistic – “ smart cunt “, aka “smart bitch”, are among the first words he says to Hanna, the insult quickly transforming into ” sour cunt » (“bitter bitch”) at his refusal to smile.
Behind the bar, which is in fact an immense rectangle around which the pack of temporary workers who have become permanent workers crowds, the duo experiences their first more than doubtful jokes, sees their English predecessors dancing on the bar half-naked and decides, finally, after discussion, to stay a few weeks while they replenish their respective bank accounts.
Danger hovers constantly, in all the plans of co-writer and director Kitty Green. All women know the banality (used here in the sense given to it by Hannah Arendt when she speaks of the “banality of evil”) of this male violence, a deaf and mute threat, constantly manifesting itself in a contemptuous look, an attitude denigrating or an insulting gesture. Here, through camera shots and sound editing, the threat becomes an oppressive prison, even in the exterior scenes of the Australian Outback.
“Will Hanna and Liv make it through this, and if so, how? » is the question that haunts the spectators (and the spectators with particular acuteness) during the 91 minutes of this anxiety-inducing suspense. But this is not the main point of The Royal HotelKitty Green’s intention being, as in her excellent The Assistant (also with Julia Garner), to explore the extent to which women are accustomed to tolerating attacks in the name of maintaining social tranquility or habit.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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