August 23, 2008
"She's a junkie to the bone."
Olivier Assayas' first (partial) English-language film and probably his most accessible picture to date - at least in a linear matter of speaking - but still full of enough of Assayas' more esoteric flair to go beyond the norm of cinema, C...( read more)lean is similar to one of those moody, wounded rock ballads like Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue" - angry, yet sedate; rambling, but hypnotic - full of love and hurt and the yearning for redemption.
This is the story of two people who loved each other before their mutual addictions got in the way: Lee Hauser (British musician James Johnston, in his acting debut), a once-celebrated rock icon, now bottomed out and desperate for a new record deal, and his wife, Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung), seen by the public as a destructive force in Lee's life and career - a Courtney Love/Yoko Ono-type figure. Following one particularly intense row in a fleabag Ontario motel room, Emily takes off and spends what's left of the night in her car, gazing out at the plumes of white smoke and sudden bursts of flame that emanate from some unspecified industrial expanse. When she returns in the morning, Lee is dead of an overdose and she is arrested on charges of possession.
Those would appear to be the makings of a film-of-the-week melodrama in which the shock of Lee's death sets Emily on the road to recovery, but Clean has neither want nor need of such heroic homilies. Nor does Assayas treat us to some protracted custody battle between Emily and her in-laws - Vancouver shipbuilder Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and his wife, Rosemary (Martha Henry) - who have cared for Lee and Emily's young son, Jay (James Dennis), almost since his birth. Much more believably, Emily realizes that - just out of jail and weaning herself off methadone - she's anything but a fit mother, to say nothing of the fact that Jay is a veritable stranger to her. So she goes back to Paris, where she reconnects with old friends from a previous life and only gradually comes to realize the futility of her present.
It's probably impossible to describe Clean without making it sound conventional, and to some extent it is, especially if you compare it to Assayas' two best-known previous films: his master-work Irma Vep and the absurdist mindfuck known as Demonlover. But Assayas embraces those conventions and then transcends them - that is, no matter how many dozens of films we've seen about junkies trying to go straight or how the death of a loved one can spark survivors to re-examine their own lives, the emotional truthfulness of Clean enters into our bloodstreams with its muted vigour, and we find ourselves getting hooked by this tale of getting unhooked.
It's a delicate picture about the difficulty of change. Clean isn't actually about the act of getting clean; Assayas isn't interested in the usual junkie montages, sequences in which addicts sweat out their problems and then either hippety-hop off into a drug-free new life or backslide into the old one. Kicking heroin, essential as it is for Emily to do so, is really the least of her problems, just the first layer of tangled brush she needs to clear away in order to find out what really matters to her. Assayas and Cheung are more interested in getting to the very human core of an essentially unlikable person. As Cheung plays her, Emily is maddeningly self-centered - it's easy to see why no one can stand her - and yet we can't help reaching out to her, believing that beneath this impossible person is someone that we might actually be able to like.
Which is where Maggie Cheung comes in. Her performance - which gave her the Best Actress prize at Cannes - is so perfect that it won't leave you for days. She plays Emily with a supernatural, hypnotic detachment, as if she's a woman viewing her own life from a distant remove, a body snatcher unaware that she has snatched her own body. Realistic, almost to the point of affectlessness, she never overreacts - she often barely reacts, even as her son tells her she killed his father - and we only get to see her beautiful smile two or three times. Cheung and Assayas were married once (they allegedly signed their divorce on the film's set), but it's clear from the tenderness with which he films her that he's still very much in love. But it may also be from this shared history of both that Clean derives its remarkable, lived-in sense of coming to terms with the past and moving toward that great blinding light that is the future.
But she's aided immensely by Nolte's terrific performance as a grizzled old soul who doesn't know how not to be kind, even to the woman responsible for his son's death. His character is the only one to demonstrate to Emily a belief in forgiveness and the possibility that humans can change. He represents hope in a film that seems to lack any positive feeling for most of its length, adding nuanced pragmatic warmth to the narrative whenever he's on-screen with Maggie. He has rarely seemed as empathetic as does here; particularly in scenes where Albrecht has to coax both Jay and Emily into seeing her as a potentially responsible adult.
The music is another character, as it suits a film about musicians. Brian Eno turns in shimmery instrumental and ambient score, and Cheung herself, a longtime amateur songstress, delivers a couple of haunting songs. Also, the cameos by Tricky and David Roback (of Mazzy Star) as themselves definitely give the film a certain credibility. Canadian band Metric also appears, both on stage and on camera, their performance of "Dead Disco" being one of the film's most striking sequences. Besides confirming Assayas' excellent taste in music, their contribution confirms his ability to get convincing performances from non-actors - lead singer Emily Haines and guitarist James Shaw seem authentically pissed off during a brief backstage conversation.
As usual with Assayas' films, Clean looks great (it always seems to be winter). It's strikingly well-shot - by cinematographer Eric Gautier - and edited and has an engagingly light-hearted attitude to geography. As 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 Demonlover. Gautier's camera weaves and flows through scenes on butterfly wings, finding vibrant bits of colour and movement in the most seemingly ordinary cityscapes, nightclubs and hotel rooms.
Clean is probably one of the most emotionally honest films about drug addiction ever made. Maybe not addiction per se, but rather the attempt to free oneself from heroin's grip. Assayas' film is not about the thrill but what happens once the thrill is gone. The film's fierce abandonment of drug-use clichés and thoughtful approach to the subject differentiates it from many films on the subject ranging from romantication (Trainspotting) or oppressive (Pure). It has tragedy and dramatic moments without ever devolving into melodrama or film-of-the-week territory, to which the basic story could have easily led. The scenes with Emily and her son are handled so fresh and real that I wish there were more of them. A breath of dramatic fresh air, a future post-rock classic and one of the strongest entries of Olivier Assayas' and Maggie Cheung's careers.
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