The Unexpected Guest in Cinema

Amy Roberts provides a filmic spin on Hospitality and The Uninvited Guest…

When I’d read that Guardian art critic Adrian Seale had described this year’s Biennial theme of Hospitality and The Unexpected Guest as underwhelming, I was initially on his side. The immediate response to hearing the word ‘hospitality’ brings up a plethora of the dull and the everyday – of canapes, coffee trolleys and event hosts with obliging smiles like a Cheshire Cat welcome mat (I’ve been there).

But that kind of a response lacks imagination and insight – hospitality, realistically, is at the forefront of most of our lives, culture and the majority of ‘industry’ available to most frustrated job-seeker. It’s actually a word with gigantic scope and implications, which in the current economic climate, and in regards to the Biennial theme, is one that can be endless, and important in our understanding of current societal structures and human nature.

At the time of Adrian Seale’s comment, I’d been watching a bunch of films (thanks to the numerous libraries of movies available on the internet) which, without realising it at the time, explored the Biennial theme masterfully. They explored hospitality in a myriad of processes ranging from utter dependence, entitlement, and love; to the dark ends hospitality can take when abused, and the fallout of a town built on the concept alone.

Bombay Beach is one such town and the focus of Alma Har’el’s film of the same name. Once an optimistic holiday destination for the privileged, it’s now a husk of unsustained industry and home to one of the poorest communities in Southern California (as well as a reservoir of dead fish where a man-made sea was once built for vacationers). The film provides a stunning narrative of an inhospitable and abandoned land, and the people who live in it.

Here the unexpected guest is Alma herself who presents a dejected subject matter in a vibrant and often surprising manner, by exploring the lives of three of the films protagonists in a colourful, unpatronising and optimistic manner. She transforms the desires, dreams and everyday routines of the three into occasional vignettes of resplendent, thoughtful and majestic performances that seem almost anarchic within a town that has become bare bones and listless.

Through film, she brings the town to life once again – a form of unreal hospitality like when a pal comes round with a bottle of good wine and home-cooked food right when you’ve spent your last penny in the bank.

Psychological thriller The Perfect Host, on the complete other end of the spectrum, explores notions of trust in regards to hospitality and observations of power between the host and the hosted. Starring David Hyde Pierce in a beguiling and wonderfully unpredictable lead role, the film centres around an upper middle-class man preparing for a dinner party, who takes in an unexpected guest in the form of a criminal on the run.

Frankly, the less you know about this film the better it pays off, and whilst it has flaws, it’s also well made, particularly in its execution of toying with the audiences notions of hospitality and the types of people you should or should not trust.

Lastly, we have Tiny Furniture by Lena Durham and The Future by Miranda July (pictured). Both films and filmmakers are often disparaged for their penchant for the twee, as well as for the frameworks which often seemingly focus on nothingness as a key drive for the narrative and showcasing worlds of white, whining, privilege. However, as a whining white woman with a penchant for the twee and nothingness myself, I obviously loved these films (and continue to love the women behind them).

In Tiny Furniture – a film which almost reads as a self-deprecating semi-biographic version of Durham’s life – hospitality, particularly in regards to the entitled attitudes of the young and the privileged, is at the forefront of the story. Its lead protagonist – Aura, a recent graduate – moves back in with her mother and sister into an apartment so cold, pretentious and clinical that it’s near inhabitable.

The film is full of bratty, entitled characters who abuse hospitality to grotesque proportions (including a potential lover of Aura’s who stays at her home just to empty the fridge and glug the free wine, but never puts out) and expect the World to deliver them with the lifestyle, career and plaudits they think they deserve without having to ever put in the effort required for them.

The idea is that hospitality goes both ways. It’s not enough to just expect it, or to merely take, you have to give something back. Otherwise you’re a jackass.

The Future also hits upon this idea but on a grander scale. Here, the idea that everything has become inhospitable due to the modern entitled attitude of merely receiving something without appreciation or working for it plays straight into the hands of destruction and ruin. The lead protagonists – a couple who have taken so much of their lives and each other for granted – go into mid-thirties panic mode when they realise that they’ve not become the people they hoped they would be by forty.

There’s an undercurrent of the irremediable throughout the film – that the need for hospitality and the dependence and expectations on people to provide it is often a short-term solution for a far bigger problem that can’t be remedied by the kindness of strangers, charity, intimacy or providing a place of escape or comfort. If modes of hospitality can’t be continuously sustained then the output will be truly shot to shit.

This theme is expressed more successfully  in the film through the work of James who quits his day job to become a door to door environmentalist whose task it is to persuade people to buy trees, something – he realises – which is absolutely fruitless in saving the environment. That little can save it. He explains to a man whose apathy against the cause is overwhelming:

“You know how in cartoons, when the building gets hit by the wrecking ball, right before the building falls down, there’s always this moment where it’s perfectly still right before it collapses? We’re in that moment. The wrecking ball has already hit all of this, and this is just the moment before it all falls down.”

You can apply this to many situations where hospitality is sought for, used, abused or utlised en masse to appease, pleasure or quick fix a scenario, but often the outcome will come right back to the starting point: people are never satisfied and deep problems always need deeper work.

Amy Roberts