Cannes. Boarding Gate.

"Girl in black underwear with Luger tucked backside over her tramp stamp - that's about the narrative extent of this blockheaded thriller from filmmaker Olivier Assayas," grumbles the Hollywood Reporter's Duane Byrge. "Starring Michael Madsen as a sleazy international wheeler-dealer and Asia Argento as the bad girl, Boarding Gate is chock full of elements that never spark beyond one-sheet dimension."

You'll see more of the same below regarding this Out of Competition selection, but first, it should be noted that Premiere's Glenn Kenny is, as he puts it, "the odd man out" here. "[I]n such situations one really must, as Sabine Azéma lip-synched in Resnais's On connaît la chanson, 'Resiste!'" The film, he proclaims, "rocked me pretty hard."

"Assayas serves up a surprisingly lackluster series of betrayals, chases and narrow escapes, distinguished only by his sharp eye for color and his penchant for letting half the visual field remain out of focus," writes Mike D'Angelo for ScreenGrab, adding that "Assayas never seems remotely invested in this nonsense - not even in a subversive, strictly intellectual way."

Screen Daily's Lee Marshall finds it "a transglobal thriller of dirty business deals and dirty sex that he has previously mined in Demonlover, with equally underwhelming results."

"Assayas is fascinated, rightly, by the skanky underbelly of the global economy," concedes Erica Abeel at Filmmaker. "But his lurid, even romanticized image of kinky financiers seems to reflect more private obsession than reality."

Cineuropa has background on the production.

Update: It's "a limp, sleazy inanity," scoffs Russell Edwards in Variety, where he predicts it's "likely to follow in the footsteps of Assayas's risible Demonlover that left a stain on the Croisette in 2002."

Update, 5/20: Patrick Z McGavin finds Boarding Gate "riveting to watch... Assayas animates the redemption of sleaze, sharply etching the dark poetry of the contemporary global marketplace that yields a perversely revealing multilingual setting of duplicitously twisted internecine corporate politics, sexual maneuvering and cultural dislocation that colors his B-thriller with a grubby tension, style, unpredictable plotting and memorably drawn characters."

Updates, 5/21: Dennis Lim, writing for IFC News, finds Boarding Gate to be "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.... 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)."

Fabrizio Maltese shoots photos of Argento for european-films.net; plus, Kelly Lin and Carl Ng.

Update, 5/24: "We're still unsold on the distinctive charms of Ms. Argento, who looks fierce stalking around in black lingerie, spike heels and a gun, but who's a strange and slurry presence on film," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "She's a little too unhinged to play femme fatale, or maybe she's just bent on reinventing the term — roles like this and past ones in Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel and Michael Radford's B. Monkey cast her as the precarious, nationless screen siren of the future circa 1998. She is, like Boarding Gate, both compelling and off-putting."

Update, 5/26: "The first half of the film wreaks [of] a bad Mike Figgis picture, taking too serious the genre which it is trying to pay tribute to, while still under the haze of Assayas own style - a combination that proves fatal," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE. "The second half picks up, cataloging through a series of exotic location while still keeping the melancholy sense of impending danger."

Update, 5/31: Karl Rozemeyer has a rip-roaring conversation with Madsen for Premiere.

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Cannes @ 60. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2007 11:27 AM