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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/19/08)

Protean French auteur Olivier Assayas, in his first fiction feature since 2004's knockout Clean, here recasts the série noir into the cool blue digital world of his controversial 2002 Demonlover. The picture begins with financial player Miles (Madsen) looking to cash out of his organization, said plans soliciting some mild disapprobation from partner André (Descas). Argento's Sandra, Miles' one-time lover, turns up at his Paris office unexpectedly. As it happens, he used to pimp her to his clients in order to glean inside info but also, and more to the point, because it turned the both of them on, supposedly. Their lengthy confrontation in his office, with the camera gliding, sometimes following the glass panes of its enclosure as much as the characters themselves, is like a kinked-up, decay-laden variant on the apartment argument between Piccoli and Bardot in Godard's Contempt. It seems to go on way too long, as does Miles and Sandra's final meeting, the better to make you squirm and also the better to make you appreciate the tossed salad of signifiers that is both the casting and the play on genre. (One of my friends who didn't think much of the movie cited what he calls Assayas' "adolescent fascination with perversity," but in the director's defense I note that the idea for the film was suggested by the real-life S&M murder of a French financier.)

Argento's character sure does get around; aside from her involvement with Madsen, she's also making the beast with two backs with her married, Asian boss Lester (Ng), who operates the furniture concern which Argento uses as a cover for her drug smuggling activities. A deal gone bad gives Ng the opportunity to enlist Argento in a murder-for-hire scheme, after which Argento has to "disappear" to Hong Kong. There she finds she herself has been targeted for extermination, and has to face down an array of characters of ill will, including Ng's wife, Sue (Lin).

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. Which is not to say that Assayas deals in bad faith. 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; the Paris of the film's first half is as alien to our perceived ideas of Paris as Godard's Alphaville was, while his Hong Kong is a crumbling labyrinth where the only clues about which corner to turn are provided by cell phone rings.

Argento's performance consists of her doing a kind of greatest hits medley that's sure to gratify her followers. She strips, she screams, she's drugged up, she pukes, she engages in nasty sex play, she falls down stairs, she fires guns — just what you want from her. But she's not exactly a spring chicken anymore, and here she's got a more than slightly haggard air. It works like mad — from the ashes of her youth arises a very feral version of a slattern fatale. The dissolute-looking Madsen seems unusually engaged by the material, Lin delivers the film's best line — "My brother-in-law is on the Olympic Committee" — with Saharan dryness and Ng is sexily shifty. And finally, the picture delivers the unforgettable spectacle of Sonic Youth's Gordon barking orders at a pack of low-level gangsters in stilted Cantonese.

— Glenn Kenny