Boarding Gate

A lower-key, appealing riff on the same erotic globalization-era thriller he first brought us in 2002's explosive Demonlover, meta-auteur Olivier Assayas' newest funhouse of pomo-woman-in-trouble Boarding Gate is art cinema made fun and sleazy. And so much more.

Assayas is a boundlessly resourceful director and in this tale he uses his signature loose, sensual style to represent what is essentially a lurid and oblique crime story, full of people with secrets and double agendas, whose longings for human intimacy and love come smack up against the system of international capital and wealth distribution. Working quickly on a low budget with largely foreign crews and without either of his usual DPs Eric Gautier or Denis Lenoir, Assayas' film harks back to the auteurs of postwar Hollywood, whose work was first heralded by Assayas 60's forefathers at Cahiers Du Cinema.

Sometimes a prostitute, sometimes a shipping clerk, sometimes a thwarted coke dealer, Sandra (Asia Argento) visits her newly divorced ex-lover and pimp Miles (vintage Michael Madsen), a Paris- based financial bigwig on the downside of his career. Much of the first half of the movie is a series of long set pieces that pulse at a slow burn, Assayas' shifty camera twisting slowly around his two ex-lovers as they spar, physically and emotionally, in the sterile modern office that Miles keeps, then in his equally numbing modern apartment. Sandra wants Miles to buy her a club in Beijing as he promised to do in exchange for a series of dangerous call-girl gigs she's done to gain information from Miles's rivals. He wants her to stay with him in Paris. Unfortunately for Miles, as the temperature of their conflict rises to a sadomasochistic boil, Sandra has one secret that will spell his demise and her swift departure, arranged by her current lover, contract killer and shipping executive Lester Wang (Carl Ng), to Hong Kong. There for little more than a blink of an eye, Sandra is captured by murderous Hong Kong gangsters, led by a Cantonese-barking Kim Gordon (whose Sonic Youth provided the score for Demonlover). Sandra quickly escapes Ms. Gordon's clutches and sets out to track down Lester and exact revenge for being set up.

Genre creatures in a loopy thriller like this rarely resonate with the depth of feeling Madsen and Argento create in their scenes together. Ng, Gordon, and Hong Kong star Kelly Lin all inhabit their roles with an equal amount of panache and immediacy. Assayas has a gift for coaxing fearlessness out of his female leads. This time out, he's found the perfect female muse for his particular brand of arty genre cinema in Asia Argento. Clearly, with this and two other films that were at Cannes last year, Ferrera's Go Go Tales and Catherine Brelliat's The Last Mistress, she has hit her stride.

                                                              Brandon Harris