Last Days of the San Jose: 2005, dir. Liz Lambert. Seen at Alamo Downtown (Jan. 12).
Last Days of the San Jose premiered at Alamo Downtown as part of the Texas Documentary Tour. It is a documentary about the San Jose Motel, a notoriously seedy joint on S. Congress Ave. in Austin, which Liz Lambert bought with the idea of tearing it down to build a cool boutique hotel. But it took her two years to get a bank to loan her the money, and in the meantime she decided to manage the old motel in order to make ends meet. She used a digital video camera to document many of the colorful characters and odd experiences she encountered during that time, which were cut into this documentary.
If you have lived in Austin for many years, Last Days of the San Jose is a kind of loopy Valentine to the days when S. Congress was more disreputable, before anyone ever thought about using the abominably pretentious term “SoCo” to describe the area.
I am torn when it comes to this kind of nostalgia. It reminds me of friends who actually preferred the old Village Cinema 4 to the new Alamo Village. They reminisce about the smell, which was dreadful. The seats were uncomfortable, too. But for some people, the old is always better than the new, even if the old was kind of skanky.
This movie doesn’t fall back on that type of nostalgia, though. You can see how happy Liz Lambert is, that she was finally able to build the hotel she wanted and rid herself of a motel that the police visited daily, and not because of donuts, either. On the other hand, she obviously developed some close relationships with some of the residents, which she explores a little in the documentary, inviting us to get to know these people too.
The movie tried hard to strike a balance in the way the motel residents are portrayed: showing some of the odd, eccentric, and even shady aspects of these characters but without treating them contemptuously. The filmmakers obviously are trying not to treat their subject with a certain level of respect. Most of the time, they succeed, although there are a few moments where they are close to ridicule. I did wonder if many of the people in the movie realized they were being filmed, and if some of them were competent enough to understand that they were going to be in a documentary. How do you determine that, when you are filming such a documentary? I have no idea.
At the screening I attended, some of the people who were in the documentary were there: local musician Gerry von King, a young man who was a teenager working as the motel janitor during the documentary, but who is now in law school. After following the lives of these people on film for nearly two hours, the audience cheered to see that these guys were still around and doing well.
It’s difficult for me to say how entertaining Last Days of the San Jose would be for non-Austinites. I think it would be interesting, but I’m biased. I don’t know if it will tour the film festival circuit, or if it will ever see theatrical distribution. But Last Days of the San Jose is a fun quirky documentary, and if you are lucky enough to get the opportunity to see it, I think it is worth a look.