Interview. Olivier Assayas.

"Italian director Marco Ferreri named one of his films The Future is Female. For Olivier Assayas, that's a given." Steve Erickson introduces his interview with the director of Boarding Gate.

"Assayas's later career has been a heady stew of class and crass, yet not even in his terrific, audience-baiting pseudo-technothriller demonlover, with its corporate-girls-gone-wild for the smart set, did he flirt as heavily with exploitation as he does here," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE.

"Boarding Gate, B-movie heir to Phil Karlson and Ingmar Bergman, screws any pretence of naturalism for hallucinatory confrontations," writes David Pratt-Robson in Slant. "If, like its protagonist, the film is brutally forthright, in B-movie tradition, that's because all it cares about is expressivity - raw impact and momentum.... Down and totally dirty, Boarding Gate is one of the best genre films in years."

Updated through 3/26.

"This is very much a French intellectual cineaste's idea of a B thriller, and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "There are some genuinely frisson-inducing twists, and he does wrap up the plot pretty neatly despite giving every indication that he's not going to. In the meantime, his mastery of the camera and his always innovative approach to setting are constant, knotty pleasures."

Updates, 3/24: "In truth, thriller is a convenient but imprecise descriptor for Boarding Gate, which resists categorization despite Mr Assayas's stated insistence that he was trying (really) to make a B movie in English," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Much like demonlover this new film plays with various genre codes and conventions - the femme fatale, violence, murder, an atmosphere of danger and dread - but plays with them very differently than most run-of-the-mill modern thrillers. Indeed both films depend on your having at least a passing familiarity with the kind of anonymously produced slick flicks - slickly packaged, slicked with blood - that are an industry staple from Hollywood to Hong Kong."

"As the film shifts to the Hong Kong streets, where Sandra flees after the inevitable bad things happen, it's Mr Assayas who seems to lose control," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun.

"The trouble is that Assayas saddles himself with a needlessly complicated plot, which distracts from the other, more elegant distractions that he clearly hopes will occupy viewers' minds instead," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento," writes J Hoberman. More in the Voice from Nathan Lee: "The story of Asia rising goes back to 1993, when, at the age of 16, she disrobed for her father, legendary giallo maestro Dario Argento, in the aptly named thriller Trauma. Going back to that squirmy moment confirms that Asia has always been the least embarrassed of performers, as comfortable flaunting her tits as she is flubbing through the silliest of roles."

The IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore look back to "some of our favorite moments from a few of her films so far."

"Assayas's thriller about a wanted woman can be ridiculous, but his 'rapturously mobile eye' (to quote [Kent] Jones [in Physical Evidence]) makes the unwinding scenes and spaces a pleasure to behold no matter what," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

"It's fitting that his best-known film in this country, Irma Vep, is a study of a director struggling to make a fetishistic femme-fatale movie," suggests David Edelstein in New York.

"Assayas seems obsessed by the workaday world of Hong Kong with its mass insouciance as a crossroads of international, interlingual and interracial commerce and industry, which leaves it little time to pause and notice a desperate European woman running for her life," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"Boarding Gate's graphic-novel style and S&M titillation disgraces the real world of young-adult bewilderment with which Assayas began his career (as screenwriter of André Téchiné's wild-child movie, Rendezvous)," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

For Filmmaker, Brandon Harris talks with Assayas about "his working method, the effects of the internet on modern sexuality and just how much the Asian economy impacts all of us."

Steve Dollar talks with Assayas, Madsen and Argento for the New York Sun.

More talks with Assayas: Scott Foundas (LA Weekly), Aaron Hillis (IFC) and Nick Pinkerton (Reverse Shot).

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 3/26: Mark Olsen profiles Assayas for the Los Angeles Times.

"Michael Clayton (and similar films of its ilk) use characters as slightly somnambulistic pawns that are moved around only to accommodate the plot (like shifting financial figures to balance the books), and its barely decipherable logic is its badge of honor, proof that the film deserves a second viewing," writes Cullen Gallagher at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Boarding Gate stands opposed to any such position: as labyrinthine as its plot may be, it is its precise intention to disorient and decentralize the spectator, just as it does Sandra: its overwhelming, jigsaw obtuseness is not the end result, but rather the impetus for a vertiginous journey about reestablishing one's identity."

Posted by dwhudson at March 20, 2008 5:28 PM