Interpret the story

In this film, they do not speak much about their experiences, feelings, thoughts and many other things throughout their lines, and so I would like to pick up some scenes and interpret the theme of this film or meanings behind those scenes. The number of the characters in the film is rather limited, but as a simple binary-opposition, by dividing them into two generations (old and new), each event will be much clearer.

There is one scene where the old man and the old lady introduce themselves. As audience, probably we do not find anything strange here, but one of the young girls looking at them doing self-introduction asks ‘What are you doing?’ with a suspicious gaze. Personally, I clearly understand why she comes up with such question, and in order to understand it, we first perceive again that her “world” is extremely closed in terms of social intercourse. For her, “others” are the only people around her who live together, and there is no such situation in which requires self-introduction as a first step of mingling. She has never experienced to meet new people, and so a concept of self-introduction does not exist inside of her and her world.

If I look at a surface of this film, I could say that it is a story which a old lady brings young girls around to find men for the sake of continuation of human beings. However, besides its façade, this is a journey to be released from a sense of “loneliness” that the old lady is feeling at the level of conscious or unconscious. Of course she is not literally alone because of the young girls, but the memory of the past keeps making her feel lonely.

For the girls, the world in the past is not more than just history or it is some sort of imaginary world that they do not belong to. Those who know the past and do not…this generational difference could not reach the point that the old lady shares her loneliness. The process of telling her name to the old man when they first meet is naturally and smoothly done, but we are shown that the old lady had never told her name to the girls, who have been spending much more time than the old man. And this fact is, for me, a clue that tells there is a sort of invisible wall between two generations.

Therefore, if the Hotel Ozone is a representation of civilized society, it should also have a meaning that the old lady passes away there. Like I mentioned earlier, let’s take this story as her journey to be released from the loneliness. Then the journey faces an end by meeting someone who shares the same memory of the past. In this sense, she achieves her aim, which is once again going back to the world she can feel that she really belongs to. Both the old lady and the man as the old generation or the people from the past stay forever at the Hotel Ozone in a shape of death, and the new generation also go back to their world = post-apocalyptic world (not for them but for us).