[Moshe]

http://www.cinematical.com/2007/05/2...boarding-gate/


Cannes Review: Boarding Gate

Posted May 20th 2007 9:05AM by James Rocchi

 

Directed by Oliver Assayas (Clean, Demonlover), the Cannes midnight selection Boarding Gate tells the story of Sandra (Asia Argento) -- a confused young woman trying to figure out her relationship with Miles (Michael Madsen), a financier who's fallen into a run of bad luck. Sandra and Miles used to be lovers, but that's over; Miles also used to hire Sandra to service visiting clients and turn their pillow talk into business intelligence; that's over, too -- but they still have plenty to talk about. ...

People much smarter than I are very fond of Assayas's work -- most especially Demonlover, a movie that elicited love-it-or-hate-it reactions from critics and viewers. Like Demonlover, Boarding Gate takes place in a hinky, kinky realm, a world of secrets and lies where big business, espionage, sex and emotional connection all combine. In Boarding Gate, though, there's one problem; the film has no motor to drive it. Sandra gets into trouble, sure -- and gets in deep -- but neither Assaya's script nor Argento's performance give us any reason to care if Sandra makes it though in one piece; the fact that Argento's character swings between seductive pouting and go-away petulance doesn't help. Argento may be an attractive mammal -- the film certainly thinks so, as it never skips a chance to show us her stripping down -- but as an actual actress, she's a washout. Not to be crass, but if Argento's line readings and character were as well-developed and fully-rounded as her breasts, I've no doubt Boarding Gate would have been a better film.
The action skips from Europe to Asia, as Sandra's involvement with a husband-and-wife import-export duo Lester and Sue (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin) deepens as her troubles increase. Boarding Gate has in interesting casting choice for one of the film's puppet-master string pullers: Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth. There's a weird thrill in watching Gordon bark orders in Cantonese to her underlings and say lines like "I have a passport and some money for you -- a new identity. ..." in her signature flat, affectless tone, but while that sonic quality may work in rock and roll, it pops you out of the film so that you're sitting there thinking "Hey! It's Kim Gordon."
Assayas seems to be trying to pull some kind of central theme through the movie -- the global movement of capital, the global movement of people, the sins of the past played out on a personal and professional scale -- but never puts enough oomph into actually developing the script or story, and seems content with time-filling shots of Sandra walking the bustling neon streets or pawing at her own ladyparts in what is, I gather, intended to be a seductive fashion.

At Boarding Gate's conclusion, we're shown who's been puling the strings all along, and why -- but the film preceeding that revelation hasn't done enough to make us care about the final revelation, and Argento never engages us as a character; she's like some porny dress-up (or, rather, dressdown) doll with a plastic visage and hollow head. The press kit for the film tries to sell us the sizzle of Boarding Gate -- a picture of Argento crouching in lingerie and high heels, a silenced automatic in one hand. With that image, the filmmakers are trying to sell us that old seductive movie combo, kiss kiss bang bang; what the film actually gives us is more like shrug shrug whimper whimper.

[greenlight]

thanks for info Moshe.

[Toxa]

cool, new movie with Madsen!

[Tokolosh]

Thanks. Why does Kim only get cameos? I'm sure she could handle a major role.

[SynthethicalY]

Originally Posted by Tokolosh

Thanks. Why does Kim only get cameos? I'm sure she could handle a major role.

Maybe she doesn't want bigger Roles. But I would like to see her in a bigger role, at least second lead.

[atari 2600]

With that image, the filmmakers are trying to sell us that old seductive movie combo, kiss kiss bang bang; what the film actually gives us is more like shrug shrug whimper whimper.

No doubt, and, of course, it calls to mind T.S. Eliot.

[kingcoffee]

I dont think that Asia Argento is a bad actress. She's not that great ut she's not that bad.

[hirsute_biped]

Originally Posted by Moshe

Not to be crass, but if Argento's line readings and character were as well-developed and fully-rounded as her breasts, I've no doubt Boarding Gate would have been a better film.

... or pawing at her own ladyparts in what is, I gather, intended to be a seductive fashion.

damn, this reviewer is brutal in the most rightous way...

did kim have a role other than improvising musician in "perfect partner"? i tend to think she might be a better screenwriter, but whatever, it's all conjecture...

[Moshe]

http://ifc.com/news/article?aId=19951

Cannes Dispatch 2: Olivier Assayas' Hong Kong and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Paris

By Dennis Lim
IFC News
[Photo: Olivier Assayas' "Boarding Gate," Wild Bunch/Margo Films, 2007]
Continuing the festival's directors-abroad trendlet: Olivier Assayas' Hong Kong and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Paris are, without question, more credible, lived-in locales than, say, Wong Kar-wai's Memphis. (We?ll get to Michael Moore's Canada, Britain and France later.)
These relocating directors seem to be operating on a broadly similar midcareer impulse, a desire to snap out of old habits, or wed them to new perspectives. Assayas' lurid, invigorating thriller "Boarding Gate" is less a transition than a stopgap, an attempt (after "Springtime Past," a project about provincial life in France, was put on hold) to take his place in what he terms "the new order of film finance." Accordingly, it's a scaled-back, quick-and-dirty production — the opposite of "Clean" (in several ways), a B-movie mutation of "demonlover" and "Irma Vep" with a few unavoidable nods to "Scarlet Diva," the globe-trotting, ass-kicking calling card of its inimitable star Asia Argento.
Half the film takes place in the anonymous industrial outskirts of Paris, the other amid the distinctive urban chaos of Hong Kong. At the heart of the rote action-plot double-crosses are the Argento character's relationships, rooted in mutual duplicity and power struggles, with two men she has worked for and loved (Michael Madsen and Carl Ng). Much of the first half is given over to two long sequences — all rough sex talk and mindfucking role play — between Madsen's thuggish entrepreneur and Argento's Sandra, an ex he used to pimp out to his clients. Encouraged to improvise, Madsen pushed things in a direction that, per Assayas in the press kit, "scared both of us, Asia and me." ("MAD-sen," Argento said when asked about her co-star at the pre-screening reception.)
The second half, as propulsive as the first is claustrophobic, takes Sandra to Hong Kong, where she must elude a host of obscurely motivated captors (through a food court, a DVD bootlegging office, a karaoke lounge). Kim Gordon, as some kind of crime boss, makes quite an impression, barking out orders in phonetic Cantonese. The finale packs the tough-tender jolt of a first-rate HK genre flick, and Argento's instinctive, force-of-nature performance is worthy of the emerging queen of the festival (she has two more movies yet to screen: Abel Ferrara's "Go Go Tales" and Catherine Breillat's "An Old Mistress").
Assayas filmed in a city he knows well, but before he started work on "Flight of the Red Balloon," Hou had only visited Paris as a tourist. He was commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay to make a film that incorporated the museum, read up on Paris (he says he found Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon," another outsider's take on the city, particularly useful), spent time there and immersed himself in French film. He eventually settled on a curious starting point: Albert Lamorisse's 1956 short "The Red Balloon."
Juliette Binoche, in perhaps the best and certainly the most eccentric performance of her career, plays Suzanne, a frazzled, bottle-blond single mother who puts in long hours rehearsing at her puppet theater company and has just hired Chinese film student Song (Song Fang) as a nanny for her young son Simon (Simon Iteanu). Obvious echoes of "The Puppetmaster" notwithstanding, it more strongly evokes "Café Lumière," Hou's previous foreign film, which likewise dealt with family rupture and had a similarly discreet yet evocative feel for daily, street-level urban existence.
There's a clear parallel here with the Wong Kar-wai — both Hou and Wong are moving on from self-consciously retrospective works ("Three Times" and "2046") — but Hou's sensibility, grounded in concrete specifics of time and place, travels better.
Hou has not adapted "The Red Balloon" so much as borrowed its iconography: boy, balloon, cityscape. The director and his cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing alternate between generally untouristy Paris exteriors and immaculately framed interiors (mostly in Suzanne's cramped apartment). The film is more ambience than plot — set to a constantly tinkling modernist piano score (replaced, amusingly, by actual piano tuning in one long scene) — but there are a number of interpolated narratives, among them the Lamorisse film, which is explicitly referenced (Song is making her own somewhat experimental version). This is one of Hou's most sublimely bittersweet films — "a bit happy and a bit sad," as a kid at one point remarks of "The Balloon," a Félix Vallotton painting that hangs in the Orsay — and it also happens to be one of his most ambitious and complex. "Flight of the Red Balloon" opened the Un Certain Regard section, but a third of the way into the festival, it eclipses all the competition titles I've seen — further reflection has made the film seem richer, stranger, more indelible. One can imagine what repeat viewings will do.

[to.w]

Kim will probably get the best actress Palme d'Or!

[nomowish]

Regardless of how many SY records I heard before seeing Last Days, I was still surprised by the sound of Kim's voice in it. She sounded motherly yet younger than she is at the same time.

Last night I watched Asia Argento's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. Apparently Asia's sexy no matter how unflattering she looks.

Oh, the climax of "Karen Koltrane" plays in the film, too. A Thousand Leaves really is one of their best.

[Moshe]

so did anyone watch it?

[Moshe]

Release date : March 14, 2008

[clever name]

Assayas is an oddity, really all over the place, totally unpredictable and sadly uneven from film to film. Demonlover was really good, but then Clean was disappointing and stagnant. Irma Vep is worth a look.

[nomowish]

I want to see a movie with Asia Argento and Benicio Del Toro as the lead actors. It would be like so BOSS. Something akin to LAST TANGO IN PARIS. Something real physical. Violent or sexual. NC-17 shit for realz. And it would be directed by.... I don't know. Someone though. Definitely someone. Tarantino, I don't know.

[Bal]

Originally Posted by clever name

... Demonlover was really good, ...

you cant be serious about that
demonlover was one of the worst films ive ever seen.

[pantophobia]

a press kit photo of Kim in Boarding Gate

 

[Moshe]

The film is screening in Siskel Center, chicago.

http://www.chicagotribune.com:80/ent...,4201408.story

[greenlight]

i saw that movie last night, just before my bedtime. nice relaxing time I had. nothing A class, but still ok. it was funny to see Kim as actress, so funny. I think she played her part very well despite the fact, that she's not actress.

 

 

 

 

[pantophobia]

where you get the snaps from?