Boarding Gate

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Boarding Gate

18% Liked It
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Boarding Gate

Alex Descas, Asia Argento, Carl Ng, Joana Preiss, Kelly Lin

Sexy ex-prostitute Sandra is forced to flee London after a steamy S&M encounter with a debt ridden ex-lover ends in violence. Fleeing to Hong Kong in search of a fresh start, she becomes involved with...( read more  read more... ) an attractive young couple, Lester and Sue, who promise to help her obtain papers and money. But nothing turns out as expected for Sandra, and she finds herself trapped in a sordid game of manipulation.

Id: 10948688

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Recent Reviews

Boarding Gate Recent Reviews
  • gor41
    February 19, 2009
    gor41
    Meandering thriller with much style but little substance. Argento may have a smouldering beauty but her acting leaves much to be desired and Madsen is unconvincing.
  • EarthlyAlien
    August 23, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    "I'm not free of anything. I destroyed my life."

    Next to, say, Michael Haneke or Gaspar Noé, Olivier Assayas is a harmless little fetishist: He takes very attractive women, thrusts them into situations of peril (physical and psychological), and gets off (implicitly) on th...( read more)eir efforts to wriggle their way out. But the thing is, he doesn't eroticize the violence the way, for example, Brian De Palma sometimes does, but he doesn't cut as deeply as De Palma, either. Assayas's newest thriller, Boarding Gate, stars Asia Argento at her most Asia Argento-esque - both aggressively carnal and progressively violated. She is, simply put, the reason to watch this film.

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    Argento plays Sandra, a very smart ex-prostitute. In the past, Sandra has done some nasty work for Paris-based investor Miles Rennberg (Michael Madsen) who was also her lover - she slept with his clients and listened to their secrets. Now she's working at an import-export company, receiving drugs sewn into the bottom of plush armchairs, and she wants freedom - an escape to Beijing, which is treated here as the Wild East of capitalism. Slinking into the frame, with her lower lip hanging loose, Argento's Sandra is both dependent on men and contemptuous of them, both seductive and unsure of herself, a dirty girl who may be looking for love.

    Boarding Gate takes place in a world in which borders are no longer important, in which fortunes are gained and lost on a computer, and in which people spend their waking lives in steel and glass apartments or in airport terminals. It's a sterile world that looks a lot like the way films 40 years ago once imagined the 21st century. Lo and behold, it all turned out to be true. Sex in this context is a way to inject some flesh tones into the frozen white-grey nothingness of everything.

    The flesh tones here are provided, of course, by Argento, who, at 32, has big circles under her eyes and the voice of someone who has been smoking since she got up in the morning - a morning, that is, 20 years ago. Her above-average good looks have a beat-up quality, and I don't know who told her that she's the sexiest woman on Earth, but she believes it - and makes us believe it. Ten minutes into the film, Miles' helpless obsession with Sandra makes total sense. He can find a Barbie doll anywhere, but it's the Asia Argento type (trashy, mysterious, reckless) that gets through to him. The rest of the eccentric cast includes the always great Kelly Lin, HK actor Carl Ng and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, surprisingly convincing in Cantonese.

    Assayas, as a filmmaker, has distilled a new genre - the vicious globalist thriller. In Demonlover, starring Connie Nielsen, and now in Boarding Gate, the characters are rootless, friendless players in the world of corrupt international dealmaking. Boarding Gate is not just post-industrial; it's post-Paris - it's set in a cluster of tall buildings with glass walls, a place from which the past has been entirely effaced. It could be anywhere. In both films, the Asian, European, and American characters speak English, as if the entire world were a single trading floor, and they hop from Europe to Hong Kong or Tokyo, where they stay in deluxe modern hotels and sleep with their business partners. The way Assayas tells it, the real currency involved in the deals is not so much capital or goods as drugs and sex. In Demonlover, a Japanese anime porn site changes hands, and the sex lives of the people doing the deal are not that different from those of the animated figures. The high-finance atmosphere is impersonal, coldly erotic, violent, and marked by constant betrayal. Some of the players have multiple loyalties; they're more like double agents than investors.

    Way back in 1980, in Every Man for Himself, Jean-Luc Godard played with the connections between capitalism and pornography, and, in recent years, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in such books as "Platform" and "The Possibility of an Island," created an eroticized but emotionally frozen post-humanist world. But Godard and Houellebecq, in their different ways, are rigorous, austere, and meanly funny, and Assayas is a fairly traditional film sensationalist. After a long, languorous conversation between Madsen and Argento at the beginning of Boarding Gate, the characters saddle up: people run through corridors, a hand-held camera crowding in behind them, and speed through the night in cars - the globalist thriller can't do without a well-photographed chase.

    Assayas, working with cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, possesses the ease and fluency of a natural virtuoso, and in Argento he has the right actress for the films he's making now: she's omnisexual, with the fluidity of money. But it's time for this talented man to pull himself together. He may have something serious to say about the brutal impersonality of global capitalism, but he's caught somewhere between insight and exploitation. (Working with a good writer, rather than composing the screenplays himself, might help.) The characters in Boarding Gate shift alliances so rapidly that you wind up not giving a damn about any of them. Luckily for him, Argento's tour-de-force performance saves the film from indifference.
  • sitenoise
    August 11, 2008
    sitenoise
    Confusing but not boring. The film has great tension, a stupid ending and Asia Argento. She's transcendently both tough and vulnerable, not to mention smokin' HOT.
  • columbiatch
    July 30, 2008
    columbiatch
    I don't get what this film is trying to do. Obviously it's not trying to be a thriller or an action film despite some typical set pieces. The first half is mostly a study of the relationship between Argento and Madson, but the second half totally abandons it for some boring and n...( read more)onsensical international thriller material. Argento does a great job here, but no performance can save this film.
  • habitualdamnation
    April 15, 2008
    habitualdamnation
    Honestly, quite borin. Unnecessary slow buildup to what could have been a decent caper. Skanky Argento is probably playin herself. In fact all the characters look too real - meanin, they're incredibly borin and say incredibly borin things. Maggie Cheung's Clean was a much ...( read more)better effort from Assayas. I really like how Chinese people appear in Assayas' films!
  • Phonex
    October 24, 2009
    Phonex
    Director Olivier Assayas, who established himself with Irma Vep (1995), a tribute to a cinematic ur-text (Louis Feuillade?s Les Vampyres, 1916), specialises in films about a globalised world with an increasingly fragmented sense of humanity filtered through a hazy, kaleidoscopic ...( read more)visual sensibility that captures an era numbed by technological glaze and the comedown blues after a night of cocktails, Ecstasy, and kinky sex. Boarding Gate forms a loose trilogy withDemonlover (2002) and Clean (2004) as a globe-trotting study of terminal emotional exhaustion, the illimitable capacity for depravity, and the simplicity of decency.
  • FiLmCrAzY
    August 26, 2009
    FiLmCrAzY
    At firt i didnt wanna see this, i wasnt interested in this at all and i should have stuck to that because this movie is extremely shit! i gave it 1 and half stars just because there was a shooting and murders that made it a little bit interesting but the rest shit!
    The sotryline...( read more) is shit and so shit that even at the end your wondering what the hell that movie is about !
    not worth the time ir effect crap!!
  • doglover000000
    August 26, 2009
    doglover000000
    This is a slow, meaningless, boring film. Only reason why i wanted to watch it, was for Michael Madsen and even this wasn't his best performance! I don't understand the reason behind this movie, but its not worth watching!! Asia Argento always looks like shes on drugs!!
  • angelfalls
    August 17, 2009
    angelfalls
    I didn't expect this to be a good movie but it was really interesting. Really loved the ending.....!!!!
  • kingmob6
    June 22, 2009
    kingmob6
    The film is a very meandering thriller, interspersed with touches of rough sex here and there. It never bored me exactly, but never made me all that interested in the plight of Asia Argento's character either, so it's just sort of a wash.

    The actual conspiracy or plot nonsense t...( read more)hat she's involved with is somewhat murky (or perhaps my attention wandered?) but what they do eventually pay off mystery-wise is too little, too late.

    Rental, possibly? For Asia fans? You decide your level of involvement with this turkey, and look for Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon in a cameo!
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