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Asia Argento walks around half naked and acts horribly with Michael Madsen in this trailer. And for some reason Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth is there too.

Antoine Doinel wrote:And for some reason Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth is there too.

She's probably still friends with Assayas after SY scored Demonlover

Casting Michael Madsen is definitely a lapse in taste of Assayas' part, but I'm still really looking forward to this. It does sound a bit silly, but Assayas' strong point has never really been providing competent narratives. On paper, Clean, as great as it is, is pretty much a Hallmark film. I don't particularly care for that random David Lynch mystery vibe anymore that's so heavy in Demonlover, either. That said, I think his aesthetic, even though it's becoming a little overused, pretty much makes up for it. The performances in his previous two films are pretty great (when isn't Maggie Cheung amazing?) as well. Setting the film in Hong Kong seems like a really lazy attempt at competing with the similar "neon-lights" cinematography of To, Wong, Hui, or any other remotely artful HK director.

But still, I want to see this.

Assayas indicated at the Q&A for the Film Comment Selects screening that the idea behind the film was to make a Hong Kong film as though it were made by a native, which explains a lot of the tropes. So like a Wong kar-wai or Fruit Chan film, he's tapping into the idea of disconnection and sense of place. He seems to be continuing on the kind of nondescript, decontextualized, globalist perspective that he started with demonlover and Clean, where people belong don't seem to be from anywhere in particular, but it's not nearly as muddled as the former nor as conventional as the latter.

domino harvey wrote:

Antoine Doinel wrote:And for some reason Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth is there too.

She's probably still friends with Assayas after SY scored Demonlover

In case you forgot... they were both in Van Sant's fabulous Last Days (which is more than I can say for Paranoid Park).

I didn't know Olivier was an actor too.

This film has some of the worst acting, plotting and dialogue ever. At one point during a "sex" "scene" among Asia, Michael and a belt, I thought that the most respectful thing to do would be to walk out of the film. Madsen is dreadful. Kim Gordon is great...when she's speaking Chinese. When she reverts to English it is scary. Asia is fine.

I loved it.

Barmy wrote:This film has some of the worst acting, plotting and dialogue ever. At one point during a "sex" "scene" among Asia, Michael and a belt, I thought that the most respectful thing to do would be to walk out of the film. Madsen is dreadful. Kim Gordon is great...when she's speaking Chinese. When she reverts to English it is scary. Asia is fine.

I loved it.

Haven't seen this yet, but that's about right for a review of an Assayas film.

Well, I didn't care for this much, but I'm not the biggest Assayas fan so maybe I'm not the right one to ask. Still, what frustrated me about it is the fact that Assayas is toying with so many themes and ideas I'm fascinated in: from gender politics to the application of identity, the viability of sentiment and the deconstruction of genre, it's all here and accounted for. So what's missing?

I think that "toying" is the appropriate word for what he's doing here and also probably the reason the film falls short. I became pretty frustrated by his scattershot technique and apparent short attention span (though I'm sure this aspect of his aesthetic was likely intended to reflect the problematic approach of most consumer based audiences; even so...). He presents some ideas and vaguely considers them but never goes into much depth exploring anything in particular and doesn't even seem particularly interested in assessing the manner in which these ideas conflate or deflect off one another. So what we're left with is a relatively unappealing mish mash of half formed thoughts and inconsistent direction. This lack of coherence hurts the picture because, at least on some level, I suspect we're meant to care about the Argento character's plight and that becomes a challenge I doubt Assayas intended. The patchwork aesthetic is a distraction from our ability to commit and invest and that's a shame as I didn't get the whiff of smug superiority off this project the way I often do with post-modern experiments in form and sensibility. Assayas doesn't want us to be removed like that and yet his intellectual provocations ultimately work against him.

Still, there are good things here and I don't want to come off as too critical. You could do much worse than this in your viewing options. As I said earlier, I'm not a huge fan of Assayas to begin with. I've missed his earliest work which I figure I'd probably like best and much of the rest has left me cold. It may be a telling revelation of some sort to acknowledge that of his last few films I liked Les Destinees Sentimentales best. Irma Vep bored me to death; Clean felt half engaged with, enlivened as it was by two towering central performances, otherwise it largely felt inert; and demolover still exerts some pull upon me to return to it but I didn't think it was that fully realized when I saw it before.

It's certainly true that he seems focused on the overall implications of the geo-political, pan-global experience and the generic title of the current feature might suggest some kind of comment on that but, once again, all his gestures seem to amount to little. It didn't help that here I kept thinking of Ferrara's infinitely superior New Rose Hotel, which, beyond simply sharing a leading lady, much more fully coheres and realizes its potential. The aspirations of New Rose Hotel also seem far greater both thematically and extra-textually. Ferrara, for instance, realizes the way that the numbing world of international business does not simply correlate with ideas of identity dissolution but demands that dissolution; also, he goes further to suggest a profound additional dimension of painful ambiguity, or pain as an inevitable result of ambiguity, which Assayas totally misses.

Anyway, I liked Madsen quite a bit for whatever that's worth and I suppose his presence was part of Assayas' whole strategy to challenge and disrupt the standard, expected narrative flow. Certainly he was going for more than just an espionage/thriller, though there are times when it feels like an Assayas directed episode of 24. I also really liked the long-ish, paired dialogue sequences between Madsen and Argento, both of which play out and are even blocked out like some kind of off, off Broadway one act. There's a playful perversity to even indulging in these scenes in which so very little of actual worth is revealed and, of course, they forestall the "thriller" angle. But Assayas has a very keen eye and he's always capturing elegant compositions even when they seem to reflect nothing but the shallow depths of the leads.

The ending points to what's wrong with the whole affair. I get the sense that we're supposed to see Argento's final action (or inaction) as an indicator of how she's changed, the turn she's made, but I simply don't buy it. It's not so much that it doesn't feel earned or believable in that sense. Assayas provides as much character development as is possible with a character who is essentially a simulacra. But the problem is that he has no sense of irony here. Obviously it's fine to take your melodrama seriously, I applaud that, but to be effective it has to accommodate the larger, contextualizing questions which give depth to a scenario by complicating it. I'm sure the argument would be that that is what the pastiche of styles and genre affectations is all about--to provide an obstruction to our easy sentimentalizing of Argento's "turn" but this is where the general incoherence becomes an issue. If that is the strategy then Assayas has to work to make all his different angles co-exist as some kind of organic whole; otherwise the implied irony of simply having these things be there to prevent easy association is problematized unwisely, if not out right short-circuited.

So, there you go. Oh, see it for the lighting though. Yeah, it's that good.

And Alex Descas looks unnervingly like Armond White.

just watched this flick. interesting movie and location shoots were good. it did fall somewhat short, especially since none of the central characters were fully fleshed out. b- overall. i did like the mystery/erotic undertones presented. wish there was more of it. story could be perhaps better completed via a sequel, especially to give a better understanding of asia's character? never will happen of course. asia was so sexy in this role.

I was absolutely blown away by this- which may be Assayas' best use of his signature guerrilla camerawork to date. The chaotic 'action' scenes in the labyrinthine grey space of the underground prison in Hong Kong destroyed all sense of grounding markers in time, place, person via film grammar, eroding the action in a thriller down to the murky, isolating sensationalism of a beating heart in darkness. While there's a lot being said here about conduits, per usual with Assayas, these moments read loudest as surrenders of existential disintegration-meets-urgent acute declarations of empowered agency in fight/flight mode, as found in his greatest work, demonlover, of which this film is of a piece. There's also a lot being expressed about globalization and how, on a micro-level, we often find sublimation in submissive behavior, here doubling reflexively as sexual games. But there's also that switch-play occurring, that uses variable mechanisms to engage in predatory survivalism within transactional interfaces, be they drug-running, sexual dynamics, spying, business ventures, violence, etc. Everything's occurring on the surface, because that's where the currency lies, but Assayas understands that this is where we've constructed meaning and depressingly the only avenues where we can truly actualize, locate, share, or steal back our identities.

The film seems to cop out in its last act by design, but the more I reflect on the ending, the more it feels like an ascension of these rules toward a higher revelation of 'self': One that refuses to play the game anymore and maybe, just maybe, can find happiness outside of transactional relationships that are unpredictable in delivering expected outcomes, but in a broad sense are predictably untrustworthy, dangerous, and irreparably self-destructive.