A B-movie that self-reflexively distills genre tropes (and
their consequent pleasures) to their lean, potent essence, Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate has a convoluted thriller
plot to ignore (or, rather, to get lost in), a frazzled, frantic aesthetic to
adore, and a lead performance from Asia Argento to get hot and bothered over.
As in demonlover (which, five years
after my dismissive initial assessment, now seems less a confused muddle than a
bold, sleek original), Assayas here revisits his favorite obsessions:
espionage, intrigue, sex, betrayal, escape, reinvention, and love and
exploitation in a globalized modern world that brings people and cultures
together and yet also fosters individual detachment. The director’s story hinges,
initially, on former corporate prostitute-cum-spy Sandra’s (Asia Argento)
reunion with her pimp-lover Miles (Michael Madsen). This culminates in an
extended dance-of-death in Miles’ chilly, sterile apartment that’s defined by
cinematographic framing concocted with an eye toward alienation, Assayas’
digital images rife with reflections in cold, shiny surfaces that repel rather
than invite. Sandra and Miles’ rapport is predicated on role-playing – which
echoes the film’s own pretense of being a straightforward genre piece rather
than an oblique, avant-garde riff on such entertainments – and once their
relationship violently ends, Sandra is thrust into a constant state of motion,
with her fleeing Paris for Hong Kong to seek out
a new identity, then revenge, and finally a glimpse of the betrayer she thought had loved her. Assayas prizes energized, sensual momentum and mood over
lucidity, his latest fundamentally a series of scenes where eliciting a
visceral, unadulterated, immediate emotional response takes precedence over
narrative logic. It’s a modus operandi aided by the director’s fluid, lustrous
camerawork, which glides, dips and soars with giddy electricity, as well as by his
persistent, subtle depiction of cross-cultural communication as simultaneously
binding and isolating. Boarding Gate
experimentally channels its adoration of Hollywood pulp into something
invigoratingly abstract (heck, even Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon randomly shows up
to yell in Cantonese), which is also a way of describing the peerlessly scuzzy,
scintillating Argento, here melding a raft of contradictory, often-ludicrous
poses – cooing vixen and mumbling junkie; proficient killer and bewildered
victim; crotch-rubbing skank and forlorn romantic – in a tour-de-force of
force-of-nature erotic badassery.
YES! Someone liked "Boarding Gate" as much as I did. I'm so glad.
Posted by: Sam C. Mac | November 30, 2008 at 11:01 PM