# Hotel Splendide (2000)

### reviewed by
Steve Rhodes

    HOTEL SPLENDIDE
    A film review by Steve Rhodes
    Copyright 2001 Steve Rhodes
    RATING (0 TO ****):  ** 1/2

Writer/director Terence Gross's HOTEL SPLENDIDE is like a Tim Burton episode of "Faulty Towers." Set on a cold British island in the middle of nowhere, the hotel is a spa for elderly guests with a regime that the Marquis de Sade would love. The bad cuisine there is ipso facto good for you. After it blocks your system, Cora Blanche (Katrin Cartlidge) administers enemas from a strange contraption that looks straight out of Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL.

With overcast skies and the look of a gothic horror picture, HOTEL SPLENDIDE is literally a dark comedy. The film is more intriguing than funny, but it has an excellent cast, not the least of which is Toni Collette (THE SIXTH SENSE) as Kath, an ex-chef at the hotel, who is there for a return engagement. Daring to serve edible and even tasty food, she sets herself up in competition to Cora's brother, Ronald (Daniel Craig), the hotel's head chef. Stephen Tompkinson plays Cora's brother Dezmond, the crazy manager of the hotel, and Peter Vaughan plays Cora's father. Cora's pedantic mother, although dead, lives on in instructional records on proper eating and health that are played during meals.

The director is, first and foremost, a visual stylist. The running joke of the film concerns the hotel's heating system. Powered by the human waste of the hotel's guests, the system is explosively affected by Kath's changes in the dietary patterns of the hotel's residents. The director, who has a wicked sense of humor, milks the overflowing sewage joke for all it's worth. After our screening, he told me that the test audiences who saw the picture hated it. He intended it for an art house audience, but the distributors wanted to market it as a crossover film so they got the multiplex crowd to see it. Guess what -- the test audiences wanted him to recut it into a different picture entirely. After agonizing over it for months, he gave up and went with a slightly trimmed down version of his original vision. The result is a fascinating film that's almost funny.

HOTEL SPLENDIDE runs a bit long at 1:45. It is not rated but would be an R for some sex, nudity and language. It would be acceptable for most teenagers.

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