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Sister Act: Hotel Sorrento (1995)

Like the source texts for Cosi and Looking for Alibrandi, I studied Hannie Rayson’s AWGIE-winning play Hotel Sorrento in high school, as well as seeing a touring stage production and watching two thirds of Richard Franklin’s film adaptation. At the time I found the play trite, though I didn’t know that word. I was also ignorant of the greatness of Franklin and star John Hargreaves, so revisiting Franklin’s Hotel Sorrento (1995) in full almost a quarter century later, my frames of reference have expanded. While I find the play a lot less trite, I remain lukewarm on the film.  

Like the recently reviewed My Year Without Sex and Floating Life, Hotel Sorrento is family-focused, and like the latter film sister-focused. After the death of a family patriarch (Ray Barrett), daughter Meg (import Caroline Goodall, following a high-profile run including Hook, Cliffhanger, Schindler's List, and Disclosure), a novelist based in London, returns home to Australia with her British husband (Nicholas Bell) where she is reunited with sisters Hilary and Pippa (Caroline Gillmer and Tara Morice, the same year as Metal Skin) and nephew (Ben Thomas). Hovering on the sidelines as long-standing sibling tensions arise is laconic journalist Dick (Hargreaves, an old hand at headlining Australian stage-to-film adaptations after The Removalists, Don’s Party, and Emerald City) and friend Marge (import Joan Plowright) who elucidates that Meg has set her recent Booker Prize-nominated novel in Sorrento and dramatized her family in her fiction.

Objectively speaking, Hotel Sorrento is a perfectly well-executed and well-acted family drama, and the themes and preoccupations of the play-text translate to film. Where the soundstage-bound artifice of Hollywood cinema in the early to mid-twentieth century meant stage adaptations didn’t have to sweat as much about opening up and shedding their theatricality (see, for example, films derived from Pulitzer Prize winners like Harvey, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Picnic) the subsequent shift towards realism in film has engendered the impulse to make stage adaptations feel cinematic. With its short scenes across multiple locations (including Meg's London apartment) Rayson’s play lends itself particularly well to film, and Franklin and co nudge it further towards cinema by keeping characters walking and cameras in motion, especially in external shooting locations with innate production value. This includes a cinema screening Wayne’s World 2, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Tombstone (what a triple feature!) which Dick and Marge stroll past. 



However, outside the immediacy of live performance, much wit is lost and scenes feel soapier. Hotel Sorrento and Franklin’s subsequent film Brilliant Lies, another stage adaptation, were attempts (and successful ones) at reviving his Australian career and courting critical respectability following the failure of thrillers Link and sequel FX2: The Deadly Art of Illusion. With its central mystery and competing he-said she-said vantage points, Brilliant Lies utilized some of Franklin’s skill set as an engineer of Hitchcockian thrillers. In contrast, Hotel Sorrento is a traditional drama, and in this respect a radical departure, but said radicalism yielded rather ordinary, pedestrian cinema. Franklin was rewarded by the establishment with 10 AFI Award nominations and two wins (for Screenplay and Barrett) for Hotel Sorrento [1], an indictment of a short-sighted industry—two in fact, Hollywood included—that didn’t know what they had in the gifted director of Patrick, Roadgames, Psycho II, and Cloak & Dagger.

Ben

  

[1] The big winner was Angel Baby, whose director Michael Rymer would later pull a reverse Franklin and pivot into genre waters with Queen of the Damned.

 

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