Checking into Hotel Celluloid

HOTELS ARE UNFAMILIAR places which aim to make strangers feel as if they are at a “home away from home”, in rooms that vary from the unsavoury and nasty to the austere to the breathtakingly luxurious. Some guests stay regularly and for long times in their favourite hotels and get to know the staff well. The staff includes a wide range of occupations from owners and managers who are constants to the cooks and others behind the scenes and the cleaners who deal with one’s intimate life but are usually invisible. Some guests may appear mysterious as their own circumstances are not evident.

Given these possibilities for encounters, planned or unexpected, it’s not surprising that hotels are favourite locations in films and literary works. Yet, they are not just semi-public meeting places or backdrops to display consumerist luxury but also serve as important spaces for psychodramas and melodramas as the spaces can be unfamiliar and seemingly unknowable, with labyrinthine corridors full of closed doors, and gardens which may conceal people, imparting a sense of claustrophobia.

In Western cinema, hotels have featured in many major films. Hotels offer opportunities for romance and chance encounters, like in Some Like It Hot (dir Billy Wilder, 1959) or they may be places where romance could have happened but didn’t, so Last Year at Marienbad (1961, dir Alain Resnais), or Death in Venice (dir Luchino Visconti, 1971) or Lost in Translation (dir Sofia Coppola, 2003).

Hotels make good settings for comedy, as places for unlikely encounters at close quarters, so The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (dir John Madden, 2011) or the spectacular Grand Budapest Hotel (dir Wes Anderson, 2014) set in some fairytale version of mid-century Mitteleuropa.

Crooks find hotels good places to operate, so Key Largo (dir John Huston, 1948) while dark psychological scenes are explored in The Night Porter (dir Liliana Cavani, 1974).

The hotels themselves may create fear as the Bates Motel in Psycho (dir Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)—many of us began looking behind the shower curtain in hotels after that— while the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (dir Stanley Kubrick, 1980) was truly terrifying.

OTT serials also find hotel optimal locations for romance, sex, murder and other adventures, notably the (first) three series of The White Lotus, which have created a massive demand for the luxury hotels they use, despite the dystopia the series creates.

Indian luxury hotels are rather different from European ones as places used by locals who eat in their restaurants, have meetings in the coffee shops and lobbies, use their shops and spas and, perhaps most importantly, hire them as wedding venues. (In London, I’ve often heard wealthy Indians deploring the lack of massive five-star venues, as they say that only one of the Park Lane hotels can accommodate even a thousand guests.) Before liberalisation in India in the 1990s, the five-star hotels were among the few places that had respectable bars and nightclubs, as well as offering clean bathrooms and shops.

Certain five-star hotels became seen as Bollywood hotels, where guests were thrilled to see film stars, such as the Sun-n-Sand, Juhu, then the Juhu Centaur, the Searock in Bandra, then the Juhu Marriott, although now the stars are more likely to hang out at homes or private clubs.

Like the White Lotus hotels, many Indian hotels have attracted tourists who want to see where their favourite films were shot. One of the most famous locations is the gardens of the former Oberoi Palace in Srinagar, now the Lalit Palace on the Dal. Heritage hotels have been popular locations where the characters’ social status can be equated with the erstwhile rajas who once lived in them. For example, the Woodville Palace in Shimla was used for Black (dir Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2005), 3 Idiots (dir Rajkumar Hirani, 2009), and many more, while the Pataudi Palace in Haryana has been used for Veer-Zaara (dir Yash Chopra, 2004), Rang De Basanti (dir Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2006) as well as Eat, Pray, Love (dir Ryan Murphy, 2010), starring Julia Roberts. Resort hotels make good locations for weddings in films (as well as being convenient for the stars to stay), such as the Oberoi Udaivilas, Udaipur, which opened in 2002, became famous for the filming of Adi’s (Kalki’s) wedding in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewan (dir Ayan Mukerji, 2013).

Hindi films often use hotels as locations for songs, dinner dates or wedding venues. Sometimes hotels pass off as family homes to show great opulence and interior design. (One film in the 1990s doing this famously forgot to remove the key drop box.)

I could think of surprisingly few films where the hotel itself has some meaning in the film as a microcosm of the wider world. One is the non-mainstream Electric Moon (dir Pradip Krishen and written by Arundhati Roy, 1992), a comedy set in tourist lodge that mocks the Western view of India.

Sometimes, a character works in a hotel. So, Namak Halaal ( dir Prakash Mehra, 1982) has Amitabh Bachchan play Arjun, a bellboy, who speaks bad English, shown in his much-loved speech, “I know such English that I will leave the British behind.” Yet, he also gets to perform a song, ‘Pag ghunghroo bandh’ and watch Parveen Babi singing ‘Jawani jaan-e-man’ in the hotel’s club.

Chunky Panday made a popular return as Akhri Pasta, a hotel owner in the Housefull films. I’ve not seen Housefull 5 (dir Tarun Mansukhani, 2005) but gather it was filmed on a cruise ship and at the Harbour Hotel in Sidmouth, Devon.

Hotels are locations for crime and moral transgressions, often murder mysteries. In Howrah Bridge (dir Shakti Samanta, 1958), Prem (Ashok Kumar) is looking for his brother’s murderer in Calcutta, where two rival hotels are run by John Chang (Madan Puri) and Joe (Dhumal), the uncle of Edna (Madhubala), a singer. Helen famously appears to perform ‘Mera naam chin chin chu’, but she has a larger role as a hotel dancer in Teesri Manzil (dir Vijay Anand, 1966), a murder mystery set in a Mussoorie hotel. In Don (dir Chandra Barot, 1978), Helen tries to help the criminals by stopping Amitabh from leaving the hotel after their tryst by performing ‘Yeh mera dil’.

Along with the popularity of resort hotels in India and overseas, Hindi films have begun to use cruise ships in a similar way to hotels, beginning with Dil Dhadakne Do (dir Zoya Akhtar, 2015).

My favourite Indian film set in a hotel remains Chowringhee (dir Pinaki Bhushan Mukherji, 1968), based on the novel by Shankar. Shankar meets a range of characters in the hotel, from Sata Bose (Uttam Kumar), Marco Polo (Utpal Dutt), Karabi Gupta (Supriya Devi), the Prakashi family, and Sujata Mitra (Anjana Mitra), an air hostess.

Perhaps Ruchir Joshi’s massive novel, Great Eastern Hotel (2025), which is going to be one of my summer reading books, will follow in its footsteps, as an OTT series, if not a film?