In The Company Of Glenn: "Boarding Gate"

May 2008

May 19, 2007

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"Boarding Gate"

Before I begin, I should fill you in on the dirty little secret of social sets at film festivals, one that seems to come most acutely into play at Cannes. We critics tend to have fairly collegial relationships all around, but of course we break off into small subsets, usually consisting of those colleagues with whom we have actual, hit-each-other-up for money, cigarettes, and/or emotional succor friendships. Those sets tend to consist of fairly like-minded individuals, but we don't always agree on everything. And when you're the odd man out about a particular movie in this situation, unless you're really into being contrarian (which I sometimes give the impression of being, but am actually quite not), your first inclination faced with the prospect of disapproval from your copains is to fold like an accordion baffle made of Kleenex.

But in such situations one really must, as Sabine Azema lip-synched in Resnais' Connais Le Chanson, "Resiste!" So now I proclaim: Olivier Assayas' Boarding Gate, starring Asia Argento, Michael Madsen, Kelly Lin, Carl Ng and Kim Gordon rocked me pretty hard.

Assayas here recasts the serie noir into the cool blue digital world of his controversial 2002 Demonlover. Pic begins with biz bigwig Madsen looking to cash out of his organization. Argento plays his former lover, whom he used to pimp to his clients in order to glean inside info but also, and more to the point, because it turned the both of them on, supposedly. Their lengthy confrontation in his office, with the camera gliding, sometimes following the glass panes of its enclosure as much as the characters themselves, is like a kinked-up, decay-laden variant on the apartment argument between Piccoli in Bardot in Godard's Contempt. It seems to go on way too long, as does Madsen and Argento's final meeting, the better to make you squirm and also the better to make you appreciate the tossed salad of signifiers that is both the casting and the play on genre.

Argento's character gets around; aside from her involvement with Madsen, she's also screwing her married, Asian boss Ng, who operates a furniture concern which Argento uses to smuggle drugs as a sideline. A deal gone bad gives Ng the opportunity to enlist Argento in a murder-for-hire scheme after which Argento has to "disappear" to Hong Kong, finds herself targeted for extermination herself, and has to face down an array of characters of ill will, including Ng's wife, Lin.

This is very much a French intellectual cineaste's idea of a B thriller and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get. Which is not to say that Assayas deals in bad faith. There are some genuinely frisson-inducing twists, and he does wrap up the plot pretty neatly despite giving every indication that he's not going to. In the meantime, his mastery of the camera and his always innovative approach to setting are constant, knotty pleasures; the Paris of the film's first half is as alien to our recieved ideas of Paris as Godard's Alphaville was, while his Hong Kong is a crumbling labyrinth where the only clues about which corner to turn are provided by cell phone rings.

Argento enacts a sort of "greatest hits" repertory in her performance—she strips, she screams, she's drugged up, she pukes, she engages in nasty sex play, she falls down stairs, she fires guns. She's got a more than slightly haggard air that suggest a more feral version of your standard slattern. (One of my friends who didn't like the movie cited what he calls Assayas' "adolescent fascination with perversity," but in the director's defense I note that the idea for the film was suggested by the real-life S&M murder of a French financier.) The dissolute-looking Madsen seems unusually engaged by the material, Lin delivers the film's best line—"My brother-in-law is on the Olympic commitee"—with Sahara dryness, and Ng is sexily shifty. And finally, the picture delivers the unforgettable spectacle of Sonic Youth's Gordon barking orders at a pack of low-level gangsters in sharp Cantonese.

Posted at 01:25 PM in Auteurs, Festivals, Movies | Permalink

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