REVERSE director Elisa Baudoin has turned a single Left Bank hotel into a full ensemble piece for Vogue Czechoslovakia's September issue, building a fashion film around a rotating cast of wildly singular hotel guests.
Hôtel des Grands Voyageurs is narrated by Nepita, a writer staying at the hotel in search of material, in the tradition of hotel-writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, a role Baudoin hands to a woman instead. Nepita spins the guests around her into characters as she watches them, and Baudoin introduces each one with its own title card, styled like a hotel room key or a nameplate, turning the film's structure into a kind of guest register: Claudette, a dancer permanently stuck mid-pose; Paloma, who runs a fake fortune-telling racket just to have an excuse to lounge around the hotel on someone else's dime; Bob, a visiting American rap star; Coleen and Cathleen Grady, twin room service staff imagined as the Shining twins all grown up, still working the same halls, now chasing Bob the moment he checks in; and Marcel, the oldest fixture in the place, sketchbook always in hand, quietly observing the guests he draws.
The visual signature leans on repetition and reflection: mirrored elevator lobbies double the twins into four, the ceiling above the hotel bar throws every character back at itself, and the film closes on the full cast pressed into one tight frame, faces overlapping, before the title card reading "The Fin."
"I'd been carrying this hotel idea around for years, so getting to actually shoot it, as my first short film, and have Vogue put it out, means a lot," says Elisa Baudoin. "The fun part was building these characters with the actors, the wardrobe team, the whole crew, and seeing how far we could push each one without losing the elegance."
Styling for the film moves through more than a dozen looks across the cast, pulling from Christopher Esber, Courrèges, Ottolinger, Patou, Louboutin and Egon Lab among others, styled by Claudia Cali.
