In the Company of Men

At the Denver City Hotel in Coolgardie, an isolated mining town in Western Australia, a jovial man places a call requesting new bartenders be brought in to replace the two who are leaving town – with the stipulation that they should be attractive young women who will satisfy the pub’s predominately male clientele:

If they look good, we can do away with the ‘experience’ bit. But if they’re only ordinary, they’ve gotta have plenty of experience, because they’ve gotta make it up with something else, don’t they?

So begins the observational documentary Hotel Coolgardie (Pete Gleeson, 2016),^[1]See Lauren Carroll Harris, ‘Women’s Work: Respect and Remoteness in Pete Gleeson’s Hotel Coolgardie’, Metro, no. 191, Summer 2017, pp. 90–3, available at <https://metromagazine.com.au/womens-work/>, accessed 11 December 2023. among the more disturbing Australian films produced in recent memory, and, in director Kitty Green’s words, the ‘jumping off point’ for her 2023 feature The Royal Hotel.^[2]Kitty Green, quoted in Gill Pringle, ‘Kitty Green’s Micro-aggressions’, FilmInk, 18 November 2023, <https://www.filmink.com.au/kitty-greens-micro-aggressions/>, accessed 6 December 2023. The link between the two stories is immediately strongly apparent – in Hotel Coolgardie, a Denver City patron eagerly anticipates ‘fresh meat’, which comes in the form of Finnish tourists Lina and Stephie; while in Green’s film, the same expression is seen scrawled on a chalkboard heralding the arrival of young Americans Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick).

When we are first introduced to these two close friends in the opening scene of The Royal Hotel, they’re among a crowd of tourists on a party boat sailing through the Sydney Harbour. Soon after, as we see the backpackers alone in the outback, awaiting a car that will take them to their new place of employment, the effect is distinctly sinister. This sequence recalls genre works such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) in which remote Australian landscapes are used as backdrops for acts of extreme brutality. By never explicitly portraying violence or sexual abuse, however, The Royal Hotel subverts such expectations; as Green has stated, the film is oriented around ‘the type of behaviour that is a gateway or entry point’ to these acts of transgression: ‘It’s about dancing on that line without ever really crossing it.’^[3]ibid.

The decision to write Hanna and Liv as American^[4]Although the characters are from the US, they choose to pose as Canadians throughout the film in a bid to be treated more sympathetically. rather than Scandinavian was apparently a requirement in order to secure financing;^[5]Silvi Vann-Wall, ‘Kitty Green, Royal Hotel Director, Talks Imposter Syndrome and Women’s Stories’, ScreenHub, 17 October 2023, <https://www.screenhub.com.au/news/features/kitty-green-royal-hotel-director-talks-imposter-syndrome-and-womens-stories-2627031/>, accessed 6 December 2023. but as a result, there’s a certain layer to the treatment that Lina and Stephie receive in Hotel Coolgardie that is not represented in The Royal Hotel. Because they are from Finland and English isn’t their first language, the latter are treated with an infuriating condescension: at one point, during their first shift, the publican takes a break from criticising their every action to ask if they eat seals and reindeer in Finland, and later comments within their earshot that one of them may be ‘as dumb as dog shit’. It’s a grotesque moment, but far from the worst that Lina and Stephie will experience in the interval of time recorded for the documentary. In Green’s film, Hanna and Liv’s first night working at The Royal Hotel is memorialised with a performance by outgoing British bartenders Jules (Alex Malone) and Cassie (Kate Cheel). In an episode drawn from a later sequence in Hotel Coolgardie, the women are framed as scantily clad headless bodies dancing on the bar, fending off the groping hands of the pub-goers – the impression is that they, like many of the male fly-in fly-out workers, have been stranded in this vaguely hellish place a little too long. In the same evening, Hanna is aghast when pub owner Billy (Hugo Weaving) calls her a ‘smart cunt’ and the boyish Matty (Toby Wallace) plays a mean trick on Liv. By the end of the shift, Hanna wants to pack it in, but her more easygoing friend defends this rough treatment as being born of cultural differences.

Beyond the odd admission later in the film (Hanna delicately shares with Matty that her mother ‘drank’; while, in Henwick’s most heartbreaking moment, Liv whimpers that in coming to Australia the friends ‘were supposed to get away from everything back home’), the backstories of Green’s protagonists are largely not fleshed out. What we do know is that both women are initially required to look for work because Liv has run out of money, which she discovers while trying to buy a couple of Foster’s lagers (one of several references in the film to Australian iconography that struck me as being a little too on the nose), and that, throughout the narrative, Hanna is the one who wants to leave the hotel while Liv insists upon staying. While this divergence is more or less chalked up to Hanna being the more responsible of the pair, it in some ways feels like a missed opportunity to explore how varying levels of financial precarity can affect decision-making. If Liv’s situation is shaky enough that she can’t pay for beers, it suggests that she may not be able to afford secure accommodation or a return flight home, which doesn’t necessarily seem to be true for Hanna. In Green’s view, any distinction between the pair’s respective situations is relatively inconsequential; asked about any potential class difference between Liv and Hanna at a Toronto International Film Festival Q&A, the director responded that she ‘never felt like that was the [source of] friction between them’.^[6]Green also notes that she thought the friends would have shared funds, but the film itself never conveys this implication. Kitty Green, in ‘The Royal Hotel at TIFF 2023 | Q&A Kitty Green’, YouTube, 13 September 2023, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fns-EWqwPjM>, accessed 7 December 2023.

Likewise, The Royal Hotel appears somewhat less interested than antecedents such as Wolf Creek or Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) – the latter an obvious touchstone that Green rightly calls ‘a masterpiece’^[7]ibid. – in exploring the animosity that might stem from perceived differences between its middle-class tourist protagonists and the inhabitants of the Australian rural community they are visiting. While there is certainly a sense in the film that the remoteness of the location – pervaded as it is with loneliness – allows alcohol-fuelled vulgarity to fester in the open, Green suggests that the setting is mostly immaterial to the chauvinistic attitudes of the male characters: ‘The behavior in the film could happen in Manhattan. There’s nothing in it that is unique to the Outback.’^[8]Kitty Green, quoted in Rich Juzwiak, ‘The Royal Hotel Is a Different Kind of Scary Movie About Predatory Men’, Jezebel, 4 October 2023, <https://jezebel.com/the-royal-hotel-interview-1850897117>, accessed 7 December 2023. In that bid for universal relevance, it is perhaps inevitable that the opportunity for a deeper interrogation of issues related to class and place is lost.

The Royal Hotel is Green’s fourth feature-length film, but her first to be set in her native Australia. Having directed documentaries Ukraine Is Not a Brothel (2013)^[9]See Karen Pickering, ‘The Patriarchy Laid Bare: Ukraine Is Not a Brothel’, Metro, no. 182, Spring 2014, pp. 74–7, available at <https://metromagazine.com.au/the-patriarchy-laid-bare/>, accessed 7 December 2023. and Casting JonBenet (2017),^[10]See Jesse Thompson, ‘Untrustworthy Images, Disguised Fictions: Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet’, Metro, no. 194, 2017, pp. 78–83, available at <https://metromagazine.com.au/untrustworthy-images-disguised-fictions/>, accessed 7 December 2023. Green gained prominence with her US-produced debut narrative feature The Assistant (2019), which also began her creative partnership with Garner. One of the earliest films to directly engage with the #MeToo movement, The Assistant follows a junior employee in a New York film production company over the course of a single day working under a domineering and predatory executive. It is a claustrophobic, minimalist drama, emphasising routine to eloquently reveal the dynamics that enable a culture of abuse. Though less restrained in tone, The Royal Hotel feels like a fairly direct continuation of The Assistant’s commendable exploration of the fears of young women trying to navigate unsafe workplace environments.

Throughout The Royal Hotel, Green effectively builds up an atmosphere of semi-ambiguous tension: a woman’s disembodied voice is either laughing or screaming; firecrackers are being set off outside a window. All of the central male characters are threatening in some way: the bitter, drunken Billy can only be held to account by Carol (Ursula Yovich), his sometime partner and the pub’s sole moderating influence; Teeth (James Frecheville) initially presents sweetly, but slowly starts to exhibit passive-aggressive entitlement; Dolly (Daniel Henshall) is an obvious creep from the get-go; and while Matty seems charming enough, singing along to Kylie Minogue’s ‘Locomotion’ on a road trip to a picturesque water hole, there’s clearly something slightly sinister beneath this facade. Certain characters correspond to real individuals featured in Hotel Coolgardie: the young, laidback Anthony, whom Lina and Stephie are wary of, seems a definite inspiration for Matty; while barfly John – referred to in the documentary by the nickname ‘Canman’ – is, like Teeth, always given his first drink of the night for free.

The men of Hotel Coolgardie are, of course, rather more complex than their fictional counterparts. Lina and Stephie’s view of the eccentric John, for example, shifts over their time in the town – initially they express feeling discomfort around him (‘I think if my dad saw “Canman”, he’d probably [buy] a ticket back home for me,’ says Stephie), but his genuine kindness eventually endears him to them. Other patrons are, unfortunately, less sincere. In a deeply alarming scene, a drunk intruder in the women’s private living area claims to be checking in on an ill Lina because he cares about her, but then becomes annoyed when she refuses to let him ‘join’ her in bed. It is even more shocking to register that such brazen behaviour occurred in front of a visible filming crew. Fiction cannot compare.

In both the documentary and Green’s film, the regular fixtures at the pub are overwhelmingly male and (particularly in the latter) white. While the handful of female patrons who appear in Hotel Coolgardie largely partake in the same cruel behaviour as the men, The Royal Hotel diverges with the character of Carol – a role written especially for Burarra and Serbian actor Yovich^[11]‘The Royal Hotel at TIFF 2023’, op. cit. – standing up for Hanna and Liv. However, in spite of Carol occupying a position of some power at The Royal, it’s implied that the hotel is not a safe environment for Indigenous people. In a brief interaction, Liv invites deliveryman Tommy (Baykali Ganambarr) inside for a drink, but Matty immediately turns down the offer on his behalf, brushing her off when she inquires further. This scene possibly alludes to an appalling 2014 incident in which the publican of the Denver City put up a sign refusing service to Indigenous people,^[12]Liam Ducey, ‘Coolgardie Publican Apologises for Barring Indigenous People from Hotel’, WAtoday, 5 March 2014, <https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/coolgardie-publican-apologises-for-barring-indigenous-people-from-hotel-20140305-346fv.html>, accessed 7 December 2023. but Green chooses not to explore this link any more explicitly.

One of The Royal Hotel’s greatest strengths is in demonstrating how Hanna’s innate spirit is interpreted by the male characters and deemed punishable. As her discomfort grows by the day, Hanna is told to smile and ‘lean in’ when she serves customers. The more she attempts to speak up, the more she is characterised as an angry, unfriendly woman (she is variously called a ‘grizzly’ and a ‘sour cunt’). Hanna finally reaches a breaking point when, the morning after being terrorised by Dolly, she discovers that he has left her a dead snake in a jar of alcohol with her name on it. Her insistence that she feels unsafe around him goes unheeded; even Liv fails to take her complaints seriously. It’s an unfortunately common story in a country in which a reported 41 per cent of people agree that many women misinterpret ‘innocent’ remarks as sexist, and in which a majority do not believe violence against women is ‘a problem’ in their own local community.^[13]‘Attitudes Matter: Overall Australians [sic] Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Have Improved, but There Is Still a Long Way to Go.’, media release, Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety Limited, 29 March 2023, <https://www.anrows.org.au/media-releases/attitudes-matter-ncas21-media-release/>, accessed 7 December 2023. Following the encounter with Dolly, a sudden accident leaves Hanna and Liv to spend their final days at the hotel fending for themselves. As tensions rise, each of the two friends becomes increasingly frustrated with the other. A frightening phone call from Jules, who is at a party and may be in danger, engenders questions that are never answered.

In Hotel Coolgardie, it’s particularly painful to observe how Lina, who is less guarded than Stephie, constantly tries to protect the feelings of the very men who are crossing her boundaries because she feels sympathy for them. ‘I think that this town has a bit of sadness to it,’ she reflects, in a quiet moment. ‘I mean, people are – I don’t know if they’re depressed, but they’re sad.’ The treatment she receives in return is truly callous. As the documentary draws to a conclusion, Lina is in a hospital bed, dealing with a serious infection. She learns from Stephie that both women have been fired from the Denver City, and further information in the film’s postscript reveals the full gravity of what transpired.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its overall adherence to standard narrative beats, The Royal Hotel ends on an entirely different and far more climactic note. Yet its final image, surely intended to be a moment of catharsis for characters and audience alike, is badly misjudged. Following a sharp dramatic escalation, Liv, whose disregard of the danger she faces by this point has exceeded plausibility, wanders off with Dolly. It is only when she sees that Hanna has been injured that she returns to her friend. Disentangling themselves from a group of men who collectively seem on the verge of violence, Hanna and Liv together set fire to the hotel and walk away in silence. This resolution barely makes sense logically – it is unclear how the backpackers will now be able to make it to the bus stop in order to leave town, or what has happened to any of the still volatile men – and feels symbolically facile.

In concluding on a note that is both far removed from the lived experience of the real women who inspired the film and disappointingly generic,^[14]Other recent – ostensibly empowering – female-centric films, like Ready or Not (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett, 2019), The Wonder (Sebastián Lelio, 2022) and even Glass Onion (Rian Johnson, 2022), feature very similar endings. The Royal Hotel fails to fully deliver on what it could have been: a tangible representation, and indictment, of the oppressions endured by women in this specific cultural setting. Simply by documenting what really happens to young, powerless women in a male-dominated environment, Hotel Coolgardie effectively captured the workings of that misogyny in all its everyday ugliness. Fiction, it seems, still has some ground to make up.