We’ve all seen them, in their varying states of glory or perhaps decay, and whether they appeal or repulse you, love motels became an alluring obsession for writer/director Carlen May-Mann and the narrative heart of her new short Romance Package For Two. A film pulsating with boredom, desire and decay, May-Mann’s queer tale of jealousy and the mundanity of life unfolds in a seedy kitschy world of heart shaped jacuzzis and questionable wallpaper. Romance Package for Two, delectably shot on 16mm, teems with emotion which overflows from the at first blush understated and carefully embodied roles of a young couple bored and dissatisfied whose true unhappy selves are sharply dragged to the forefront by a stranger with a flashy jacket. Romance Package for Two doesn’t focus on the pain of infidelity or the lure of a different reality but rather uses its location as a metaphor for the deterioration of a young relationship and could easily refer to the drudgery many people find themselves unwittingly slipping into. As Romance Package for Two premieres on the pages of DN, we spoke to May-Mann about being turned down for locations whilst scouting due to the false assumption they were shooting a porno, the intricately planned pieces of production design which elevate each carefully captured moment and how she visually separated the tired and old from the new and enticing.
The love motel feels like the epicentre of the universe in your short, where did the appeal of that locale as the setting of your film come from?
I spent all of the 2020 quarantine in my Brooklyn apartment and, like everyone, picked up a series of eclectic hobbies and interests. One of them was love motels. I’ve always been drawn to kitsch and camp, and I became obsessed with these bizarre places that offered the chance to experience another world localized to a room: a world where everything was literally rose-colored, where you and your lover could escape to hide ensconced in a blissful caricature of romance. It turns out there are tons of these spots scattered all across the country, way more than I expected. Many of them are more or less untouched since their heyday in the 70s. Many have become tourist attractions, but some just continue to function as they always have. Ultimately, though, what really fascinated me was the false promises they offered. When you start digging into Yelp reviews, complaints abound – broken furniture, pests, decades-old cigarette stench, and so on. I was fascinated by the idea of a so-called romantic getaway that is in fact crumbling around you, like reality interrupting a sweet dream.
I wanted the location to echo the idea that once the thrill of a romantic relationship has worn off or been yanked away, the worst parts of ourselves can emerge.
I tend to use locations as a jumping-off point when I write, and I knew I wanted to set something in a love motel. The basic premise of a messy queer love triangle had been floating around in my head for a little while, but the story started to clarify when I fit the two pieces together. At their core, love motels are built around an uncomplicated fantasy of what love should be, so there’s a cruel irony about looking into a heart-shaped mirror just after your heart has been broken – mocked by your very surroundings. I wanted the location to echo the idea that once the thrill of a romantic relationship has worn off or been yanked away, the worst parts of ourselves can emerge. Roaches crawl into a pink lacquer sink as a relationship begins its slow march toward death.
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It must have felt like a Herculean challenge to find the right location, what were you looking for exactly and did the final choice affect anything in the original script?
I had no illusions that finding the right location would be a big challenge, but I chose to be an idealist because I knew that if we succeeded it would be worth it. Most, if not all, of the credit for making it happen goes to my star producers João Pereira-Webber and Noah Dirks who, aside from putting in so much legwork, never tried to tamper down my belief that we would find THE motel. We got a lot of nos, a lot of people resolutely shooting us down because they thought we were trying to shoot porn. Honestly, it was serendipity that not only did we find the perfect location, but the owner was willing, if not a bit reluctant at times, to work with us.
That being said, I wrote this script knowing that most of these motels share certain attributes, like jacuzzi tubs in every room, and strangely the exact same heart-shaped beds. So there actually were a few that could have fit the bill, and just being able to shoot in an actual love motel meant that any changes to the script weren’t made to accommodate the location.
Tell us about the production design and really making the motel what you needed it to be.
Actually, much of what you see on screen came with the motel. A lot of it came down to, paradoxically, both augmenting and toning down what was already there. We took out some fixtures and elements that didn’t quite fit with the aesthetic and then added touches to make it feel more cinematic and textured, like the beaded curtains and table lamps. The office set ended up being the biggest labor, the room we shot in was basically empty when we got in. My production designer Lisa Loew put in some seriously amazing work to make it feel dull and oppressive but not empty.
A big part of the work that Lisa had to do in the motel itself was to differentiate Cleo and Judy’s room from the one that Candy stays in. The former had to feel lived in and personalized and the latter made to look presentable. This all came down to the details, like a handmade quilt or a phone charging on the bedside table. Something I love about production design is how small touches that you might not even register when you watch something make all the difference in telling you what you need to know about characters and their lives.
The almost tangible monotonous drudgery between Cleo and Judy is so perfectly juxtaposed against the allure of Candy – how did you work on visualising that friction between their tired relationship and the potent excitement of this intriguing guest?
The way the characters interact with the location played a huge part. Most of the time that Cleo and Judy spend together isn’t in the ‘romantic’ rooms, but rather in the stark, dull office. Candy, on the other hand, takes advantage of the space and immerses herself in its quirks – I can’t imagine that Cleo or Judy have used the jacuzzi tub in a while. She brings with her a fresh vantage point, a curiosity that Cleo and Judy don’t have. A big part of Cleo’s immediate attraction to Candy is that she brings something new and different into her life. It’s like she’s turned on a light in a dark room.
In a way though, I think that Candy fits into the milieu of the motel more than Cleo or Judy do. Like the motel, her aesthetic and personality are bold by design. It’s in the script that Candy has a flashy jacket – that was important to me from the beginning. Costuming is incredibly important to my process, and I felt that this choice would make Candy instantly appealing while efficiently conveying important information about her character. A certain type of person wears a flashy jacket. By contrast, Cleo and Judy both dress in oversized, neutral-toned clothing. A big shout out to my costume designer Jessica Sheehan who suggested the couple share clothes – a very queer thing to do, and also something that specifically connects the monotony of their lives to the failings of their relationship.
In addition, I wanted the camera’s relationship to Candy to feel very voyeuristic, she’s first seen from Cleo’s POV through a long lens, and from there she’s often viewed through windows or from a distance. Voyeurism encompasses both desire and jealousy – Cleo watches Candy because she wants her, Judy watches her because she’s the object of Cleo’s attention. In watching her without her knowledge, both dehumanize her. Cleo sees Candy as a break from the monotony, something pretty and shiny, while Judy sees her as the harbinger of destruction in her relationship, but neither really registers her as a person. That’s why it was incredibly important for me to have the scene of Candy drawing on her eyebrow in the mirror. Finally, no one is looking at her but herself. Yes, she was used unfairly as a tool in something toxic beyond her control, but ultimately, she’s resilient. She’s the one who gets to leave.
I wanted the camera’s relationship to Candy to feel very voyeuristic, she’s first seen from Cleo’s POV through a long lens, and from there she’s often viewed through windows or from a distance.
The cinematography is very effective at making the pretty look dull and teasing us with bites of horror – what references guided that and how did you ensure it didn’t get too shiny?
I knew early on that I wanted to shoot on 16mm film. It all really started with the cockroach. I loved the juxtaposition of shooting a nasty little pest on a medium increasingly associated with high art and I couldn’t get the image out of my head. I wanted the film to be beautiful and dreamy, but I also wanted to capture a sense of sleaziness. It would definitely have been easy to make this location look too polished, but 16mm gives it a tactile grittiness while enhancing the texture and color in a way that’s much harder to achieve with digital. My DP Justin Derry has shot a lot on film and has a real eye for detailed layered compositions even within the very small spaces we were working with. We shot a lot of the film handheld, which also played a big part in keeping the cinematography from feeling overly neat.
I loved the juxtaposition of shooting a nasty little pest on a medium increasingly associated with high art and I couldn’t get the image out of my head.
Justin and I gravitated early in the process to the collaborations between Wim Wenders and Robby Muller, particularly the way that Muller’s cinematography uses color as an important part of telling the story. The depictions of Americana in Paris, Texas and similarly in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, were useful inspiration points. The photographs of William Eggleston and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, specifically the Hustlers series, also project an aura of American roadside melancholy that I love. Carol, maybe unsurprisingly, came up a lot, both because of its lush 16mm cinematography and how it uses the camera to convey desire between women. The films of Eliza Hittman also use 16mm film in a way that spoke to me; there’s a particular type of intimate loneliness in her films that I hoped to embody.
Anyone who’s ever been in a romantic relationship has been hurt and has caused hurt whether they’re queer or not because people are flawed.
At its heart, this is a story about love and the pain it encompasses. Why is it important for you to make queer films with these types of storylines?
There was such a dearth of queer stories in cinema for so long that it isn’t surprising a lot of modern films are love stories – endless bittersweet tragedies, and an increasing quantity of rom-coms in recent years. When you only see yourself stereotyped and villanized on screen for so long, it’s natural to want to see your joy and heartbreak romanticized the way straight people have always been able to. It’s not that I don’t relish getting to see queer love stories (I do), but when romanticization of our relationships starts to feel like the default it risks crossing over into a different type of dehumanization. When all conflict comes from forces external to the characters, something fundamental is ignored.
I want to see more about the conflict we cause ourselves. Anyone who’s ever been in a romantic relationship has been hurt and has caused hurt whether they’re queer or not because people are flawed. There’s a universality to heartbreak that binds us, and so often heartbreak involves people at their worst, lashing out in the name of what’s supposed to be the greatest thing in the world. Love stories allow us to indulge in escapism, but stories about the consequences of love gone wrong provide an important form of solidarity and catharsis for those who are hurting. Both are needed. It’s the most human thing in the world to mess things up in love, to make mistakes and fuck up with other people as collateral. Some of the ways we scar each other are universally human, but certainly some are specifically queer, and I wanted to explore both in this film.
What’s next for you?
I’m looking towards my first feature, I hope! I have a few in development. I’m currently working on From Your Eyes To Mine, a ghost story set in my hometown of Laguna Beach, CA. It’s a fictionalized version of my own experience grieving the death of my mother that mixes drama with horror and absurdism. I’ve also been working for a while on a horror feature called Strawberry Summer, plus I’ve written a treatment for a feature adaptation of Romance Package For Two. And then in another vein, I’ve been working on a short documentary about a historic fire in Laguna that uses archival footage and interviews with my family.
