>>REVIEW
CLEAN
STARRING Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte
DIRECTED BY Olivier Assayas
Opens Friday, September 16
Uptown Screen
Following the story of a rarefied business class who travels around the world free of financial worries or moral compunctions in his grim fantasy Demonlover, French director Olivier Assayas returns to his more usual explorations of the difficulties that come with having actual obligations to the people who make up one’s life with Clean.
Junkies Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung) and her aging rock star husband Lee Hauser (James Johnston), are on the road hitting such second-tier hotspots as Hamilton, Ontario. After a fight in their hotel room, she goes to shoot up by the lake, and when she returns in the morning, Lee is dead of an overdose and she is sent to jail for possession.
When she gets out, she finds that custody of their son has been granted to Lee’s parents, Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry). Much of the rest of the movie is about Albrecht quietly trying to make it possible for Emily to eventually have Jay again, even though Rosemary despises her. Meanwhile, Emily has gone back to Paris to try to rebuild her life.
Assayas is good at depicting people who have such a hard time living their lives that they don’t ever manage to do much more than pick up the pieces. As he has done in other movies (Irma Vep and Late August, Early September), he provides plenty of background story, especially about Emily. Some of it may seem superfluous, but it creates a realistic sense of a messy life of bad decisions and strained relationships that leave little for her to build a future on.
Clean is an international co-production involving France, the U.K. and Canada, and it shows. The English dialogue is sometimes awkward, and the changes of locale seem arbitrarily made for the sake of a nice-looking scene. The appearances by various pop musicians (including Metric, Tricky and David Roback) as themselves may serve to establish the milieu in which Emily has lived, but they also seem just a little cute as well. That said, Assayas chooses the music well, as usual.
Assayas has a light touch and a graceful style that has helped him steer clear of sentimentality in the past, but it doesn’t completely work for him in Clean. He does suggest that Emily’s grief will stay with her long after her catastrophe is overcome, and though he has Albrecht optimistically observe that people can change if they really need to, Emily will always have to carry her past with her. |
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