I’m not sure when, exactly, Olivier Assayas became an eccentric – I
didn’t
catch any warning signs in Late August, Early
September; then again,
I was a bit discomfited by Irma Vep, which was as much an
essay on the filmmaking industry as it was (or was not, quite) a compelling
narrative. With 2002’s Demonlover, a weirdly moralistic screed
involving global corporate intrigue, sexually explicit anime and Internet
porn, he veered into reactionary territory, dramatizing the dehumanizing,
exploitative power of the Web in much the same way David Cronenberg
once made a scary monster out of cable television in Videodrome.
In that context, and on paper, Clean seems like a settling
down. Assayas once again winds his narrative down to human scale and
returns to the artistic compatriate he found once upon a time in erstwhile
lover (and erstwhile wife) Maggie Cheung. She plays Emily, wife
of a rock star named Lee Hauser, who’s tangled up in drugs and
struggling to reinvent a flagging career. When Lee winds up dead of
a motel-room drug overdose, Emily joins the inspired-by-the-true-story
tradition of superstar spouses who struggle to recover their balance
outside the single-degree-of-separation spotlight glare that both illuminates
and casts shadows across their own lives.
As personal as the story is, and as quietly intense as Cheung’s
performance is, Clean is punctuated with weird fillips and
indulgences. Released after being jailed on drug charges, Emily knows
that if she wants to regain custody of her son, she will have to prove
herself to her gruff father-in-law, Albrecht (Nick Nolte). To do that,
she tries to enlist the help of Tricky (!), who drops into the show,
playing himself, as a massive sort of non sequitur. It’s
explained, in dialogue, that he’s an old friend of Lee Hauser’s
who’s
gained Albrecht’s trust by honoring Lee’s memory, and therefore
somebody Cheung hopes will vouch for her with Albrecht – but
it doesn’t wash. It feels like an elaborate excuse walk-on cameo
by a star Assayas admires. At the same time, there’s something
chilly and beautiful in the way Tricky rebuffs Cheung’s repeated
attempts to enlist his help with an emphatically silent shake of the
head. He’s like The Godfather declining to help you out of a
tough spot, or the banker denying your loan application. And then he
disappears from the narrative.
As out-from-under-addiction stories go, Clean goes down easy. Emily’s
struggle with addiction is discussed more in exposition than it is
demonstrated in performance — though there’s something just right about
the scene that shows her working, pathetically,
as a server at a Chinese restaurant. (It might not be rock-bottom,
but seeing the beautiful, ordinarily so self-possessed Maggie Cheung
waitressing inspires a certain level of cognitive dissonance.) The
gist of the whole piece seems to be that she will redeem herself only
by creating something to call her own, therefore crawling out from
underneath both her jones and her husband’s
reputation and ensuring that she’ll
be able, psychologically, to make some kind of life together with her
son. And Cheung’s singing, in an emotionally charged scene where
she takes those first steps toward happiness, is — well, her
English-language vocals are competent, but rather idiosyncratic. And
that performance inspires contradictory feelings at a crucial emotional
nexus for the film, which starts to feel less “character study” and
more “Maggie Cheung vehicle.”
.
Then again, Nico and Yoko Ono had unusual voices that both grated on
lots of nerves, and they
both became pop icons of a high order in the U.S. music industry, so
maybe Emily does have a shot at the big time. The good news is that
Cheung’s
performance in the film is, perhaps uncharacteristically, understated
and inviting. She holds the screen together even as the threadbare
narrative diffuses. Nolte makes a gentle and wise surrogate father
figure — it’s
fascinating to watch the pas
de deux between the two of them, as Emily tries to win
Albrecht’s confidence
and Albrecht considers quietly how much of it he’s willing to
yield (and how much of it he must give away). And Assayas still has
a way with the handheld camera that’s damned near preternatural — rich
in color and texture, with the occasional revelatory touch that makes
so many sins forgiven. There are visuals here, wrangled by ace cinematographer
Eric Gautier, like a shot of a car parked overlooking a field of industrial
smokestacks, that have an eloquence and power that only become more
apparent in hindsight. The cutting, by Luc Barnier, is seamless, working
the film across the cuts like a nimble-fingered massage over your pleasure
centers. Whatever else it may do, Clean never bores.
Bottom line, Assayas remains a sensitive director whose persistent
involvement with deeply troubled characters and evocative imagery is
admirable and, in some ways, unrivaled. He’s one of the best
we have. It’s just that Clean plays
like the work of a great auteur working in sandbox mode — the
casting of Cheung, Nolte, and Béatrice Dalle in the same film
is sort of the arthouse equivalent of a fantasy football draft, with
cameos by Tricky and Mazzy Star founder David Roback adding rock-star
gloss — to
build a world that has too much of the whiff of hipster fabulism about
it to play at gut level.