| THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE : Olivier Assayas's 'Clean' [7/10] |
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| Wednesday, 27 July 2005 | |
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Writer-director Assayas's first collaboration with actress Maggie Cheung, Irma Vep (1996), was one of the finest and most exhilarating French films of its decade - a love letter to Cheung and to the possibilities of cinema itself, packed full of remarkable sequences and dazzling epiphanies. Eight years on, Assayas and Cheung have since got married and divorced - and have now reunited for Clean. The personal circumstances involved mean this isn't perhaps so much a 'love letter' as an affectionate adieu - but, just like Irma Vep, Clean is above all a showcase for Cheung's considerable talents. And such an effective one that she won the Cannes 2004 Best Actress award for her nimbly trilingual turn as Emily Wang, long-term partner of past-his-prime, vaguely Joe-Strummer-ish rocker Lee Hauser (James Johnston). The film begins with Emily and Lee in Hamilton, Ontario where they attend a gig, score heroin, and conduct what's clearly only the latest in a very long series of ferocious arguments. Emily storms off to shoot up in her car on a riverside car-park, opposite a vast, fume-belching industrial plant. Next morning, Emily returns to find the hotel swarming with police and Lee being zipped into a body-bag. She ends up in jail for heroin possession, and so begins the painful process of rebuilding her life from scratch - with the ultimate aim of becoming a proper mother to her young son Jay (James Dennis) who's been brought up in Vancouver by Lee's ageing parents Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry). Clean has much of the same appealing, free-wheeling looseness that so invigorated Irma Vep - but only once does it really hit the magical heights of that earlier film. That coup de cinema is the shooting-up scene, when Eric Gautier's camera shows a remarkable widescreen, distinctly Michael Mann-ish nocturnal shot of the car, the river and the plant beyond. Just as the heroin is flooding into Emily's brain, there's a huge, silent flare that looks like some kind of chemical fire (perhaps the burning of rubbish?) that lights up the night for just a few seconds. It's a transcendent, ecstatic moment - perhaps also the moment of Lee's death, the dramatic event setting in motion everything that follows. Emily's progress towards a 'clean' new life isn't, however, itself an especially dramatic one. Though that doesn't mean it's without incident: her quest does, in one oddball episode, see her trying to rope in Lee's friend, international music star Tricky (playing himself - as does Mazzy Star's Dave Roback late on) in support of her 'cause.' But Clean strenuously avoids melodrama to build a patient, elliptical, adult character-study of a woman in crisis - you hate to think what, say, Lars Von Trier, would have come up with if tackling the same material. Though clearly to some extent inspired by famously controversial 'rock wives' such as Yoko Ono and Courtney Love (the music press, we're told, has long blamed her for Lee's decline), Emily becomes a much more interesting figure as she belatedly grows up and embraces something approaching respectability. Her scenes with young Dennis have a touching believability, and there are also vivid supporting turns from Nolte and Dalle (though sadly these legends never get a scene together), with Balibar and the less-familiar theatre-veteran Henry also making an impact from limited screen-time. As usual with Assayas's films, Clean looks great (it always seems to be winter!), is strikingly well-edited (by Luc Barnier) and has an engagingly blithe attitude to geography. As befits a UK-Can-Fr co-production, the action moves fluidly between Canada, London and Paris (and, briefly, San Francisco) - though we're a long way from the chilly, drop-dead-hip global-citizenry on show in Assayas's poorly-received previous picture Demonlover. Whatever its deficiencies (and this reviewer only got halfway when watching on video), Demonlover did boast a nifty Sonic Youth soundtrack. And, appropriately enough for a film which exposes the internal workings of the music industry just as expertly as Irma Vep did with moviemaking, Clean scores strongly in the soundtrack department - Assayas making particularly effective and haunting repeated use of some suitably shimmery Brian Eno instrumentals. Neil Young |
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