Boarding Gate
Encyclopedia
Boarding Gate is a 2007 French thriller about the sophisticated power plays between a debt-ridden underworld entrepreneur, his provocative and ambitious ex-associate and a manipulative young couple who employ her. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas
, the film features an international cast comprising Asia Argento
, Michael Madsen
, Carl Ng
and Kelly Lin
. Kim Gordon
, of the band Sonic Youth
, also plays a supporting role as an enigmatic businesswoman forced to intervene as events unfold in Hong Kong.
The film premiered 18 May at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival
and later opened in France
on 22 August 2007.
Sandra. Brazenly taunting him with her sexuality, she bluntly dissects their prior relationship - a nightmarish web of masochism, money, manipulation and dependency, pimping her out to dangerous clients in order to gain both a business advantage and perverse personal thrills.
She outlines her newest ambition, since their estrangement, of raising the necessary capital to run a nightclub in Beijing. Miles makes no pretense of the fact that he is less interested in the proposal than the woman, and encourages her to visit him at his apartment.
Without making any promises, Sandra leaves for her job at an import business, run by a young married couple: Lester and Sue Wong.
Sandra's own import sideline, drug running, is facilitated by her close bond of loyalty with low-ranking employee Lisa. Acting as her driver and lookout, Lisa escorts Sandra to the site of a drug deal that quickly goes sour when her buyer is revealed to be a Narcotics officer. Suspicious after Sandra's cool response to his earlier queries about a missing container in a recent shipment, Lester follows Sandra to the deal and accosts Lisa as she waits in the car. He sends Lisa away on his motorcycle and takes her place in the car.
After Sandra emerges, Lester drives her away from the scene. Expressing disappointment in her deceit, he takes her back to her apartment where it becomes clear that the two are romantically involved. After their sexual encounter, Lester receives a call from his wife and leaves.
Sandra appears to relent and arranges to visit Miles at his apartment. Goading him with recollections of their misdeeds, she reveals a deep-seated bitterness; she recalls, in particular, an incident where a group of Japanese clients she was entertaining drugged and raped her, and Miles' arousal at hearing the episode recounted in front of his girlfriend. They both drink and end up on the balcony. Sandra undresses and tries to instigate a violent sexual game, apparently of the genre they used to practice, by pinning Miles to the floor of the balcony and choking him with his own belt. Miles warns her off and leads her back inside to show her a pair of handcuffs, which he intends to use on her later in the evening. She expresses reluctance which he nonchalantly waves aside. When she tries to leave, he locks the door and pockets the keys.
After he takes a business call, she playfully restrains him with the handcuffs, then brutally shoots him in the head.
She quickly retraces her steps through the house, destroying evidence of her presence, and makes a swift exit with Miles' keys. Lester picks her up, gives her a modest sum of cash and the name of a contact in Hong Kong who will arrange her new life, promising to join her soon. Lisa first drives her to a club to establish an alibi, where the oppressive atmosphere and the noise provoke an aggressively traumatic and regretful response to her act.
A manifestly wealthy, middle-aged Western woman arrives at the office and orders the men to bring Sandra out, chastising them for Lisa's death. Eventually, one of the men in the office is sent in after Sandra. Having switched clothes and positions with the corpse of Lisa, she manages to ambush the henchman and escape onto the streets. Whilst crossing on a ferry she cries over her last souvenir of her relationship with Miles, his keys, before dropping them into the water. With little money and no recourse to her credit cards or passport, due to risk of capture and extradition for Miles' murder, Sandra resorts to repeatedly calling Lester.
She eventually manages to contact his wife, Sue, who maintains that Lester is unavailable but agrees to meet Sandra in a karaoke club. Sue is evasive and aggressive, revealing that whilst she knew of Sandra's affair with Lester, Sandra was not her husband's first infidelity and he never really planned to leave his wife to join her. The whole venture was an attempt to raise the investment capital for the Beijing club, an enterprise in which Sue was fully complicit. Whilst she attempts to take everything in, Sue spikes Sandra's drink with a sedative.
In a back room, Sandra threatens Sue with a gun and demands more information; Sue pleads her innocence until she manages to talk Sandra into succumbing to the drug's sedative effects. She leaves Sandra unconscious on the floor. Sandra wakes in the home of the wealthy Western woman whom she escaped in the offices earlier. The woman explains that she owes someone a favour and sets Sandra up with papers and well-paid employment in Shanghai.
Nonetheless, Sandra eschews the easy escape and tracks Lester down in a Hong Kong shopping mall. She follows him up the staircase with an unsheathed knife, but as she prepares to stab him she is interrupted by a group of women coming the other way. Lester enters an expensive restaurant, meets with Miles' business partner, André, and leaves with a sports bag full of cash - possibly a payment for Miles' murder, which ensured that his shares did not pass to his unscrupulous creditors. Sandra follows Lester down to the doorway out to the car park, where he hesitates at the threshold as if aware of her presence. At the last moment, however, she finds herself unwilling to either kill or confront him. He drives away with the money.
cites the inspiration of the film's driving themes as a news story relating the murder of financier Édouard Stern
during an S&M
play session at the hands of his long-term lover, prostitute Cecile Brossard. The incident evoked the tone of his previous work on corporate deviancy, "Demonlover
", and he determined to use it as the pivotal event for a new script.
The title Boarding Gate was the director's second choice for the film. His first, departed - a reference to the passport stamp applied by Hong Kong border officials upon leaving the country - had to be scrapped during filming upon the 2006 release of Martin Scorsese
's The Departed
. The final title was selected since it evokes the many easy conduits in the film, "the idea of a passage between two worlds."
Assayas decided to embark on the "B-movie" concept after frustrating financial complications interminably delayed production of another of his projects, intended to be "a very French film focusing on provincial life;" similar circumstances led to making of his previous film with Maggie Cheung
, Irma Vep
. The total cost of the film was under €2 million.
The local team was also of such an unwieldy size that Assayas frequently invented projects or errands simply to clear the set.
was considered by the director to be "inseparable from the narrative"; protagonist Michael Madsen
was cast later via a mutual association with Nick Nolte
, as Assayas conducted a search for an actor suited to the physical properties of the role. The scenes documenting their relationship, from the reunion after their long and awkward estrangement to the murder in his apartment, were shot in chronological order. Their first meeting was on camera, during the shoot of the reunion scene. Assayas remarks on Madsen's unpredictability as an actor, contributing his own small touches to his scenes. The choreography in the scene of violent sex play on Miles' balcony involving strangulation with a belt, for example, was vastly expanded by Madsen's suggestions.
Kelly Lin
and Carl Ng
, playing the ambitious Wong couple, were selected as good examples of the "new generation" of actors working in the Hong Kong film industry. Kim Gordon
, whose acting roles had been considerably undemanding before Boarding Gate, had worked with Assayas previously with the music for Irma Vep
and Demonlover
. Based on her experience of living in Hong Kong in her youth and on her desire to further her acting career, Assayas cast her in a supporting role.
professor of English Steven Shaviro
, author of The Cinematic Body, has composed a lengthy essay on the themes of conduits and interchangeability in the world of global capitalism as they are explored and visualized in Boarding Gate.
reported that 26% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 39 reviews. Metacritic
reported the film had an average score of 47 out of 100, based on 15 reviews.
Marketed as an "erotic noir-thriller", the film incited some tough criticism for its more explicit content, which explores earning it the title of "a limp, sleazy inanity" with "a whiff of voyeuristic self-indulgence" in Variety's
review of the film. Even the more positive pieces comment on this, such as Slant Magazine's
review by David Pratt-Robinson that remarks that lead actress Asia Argento "looks ready to rape anything in sight".
The film's acting inspired a wide range of critical opinion, although the view that Asia Argento is one of the most appealing aspects of Boarding Gate is nearly universal. The Village Voices J. Hoberman takes this common remark to its extreme, when juxtaposed with a scathing review of the film - "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."
Several reviews go as far as to imply that it is the inevitable product of the actress' own provocative attitude rather than simply a performance. Manohla Dargis, praising Argento's performance as striking, notes that her "on-screen ferocity" only nearly rivals her prominent tattoos and "the ease with which she sheds her clothes, which explains why I can describe those tattoos with confidence." Describing her as "aggressively carnal", New York Magazine's David Edelstein makes the wry remark that he "can’t help thinking there was a mix-up at the hospital and her dad was Klaus Kinski."
David Pratt-Robinson had a positive take on the character: "so fierce and so fragile,... a global misfit, a citizen of the world who can't quite find her place...yet, somehow, she makes the idea of being in transit feel like home." Whilst criticizing her general approach to acting as "bluffing her way through", The New Yorker's David Denby similarly describes Sandra as "lewd and hungry, but she’s not boring — the character keeps changing, and you can see Argento’s mind working behind all the viperish moves."
Little attention is generally given to other performances, summarized by Variety in the phrase "cast, whether native English speakers or not, woodenly recite their lines." However, Kim Gordon
's "god-awful cameo" as businesswoman Kay is frequently singled out for criticism. She "gives one of the worst musician-turned-actor turns in recent memory," according to Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News.
Boarding Gate was placed at 83 on Slant Magazine
's best films of the 2000s.
Olivier Assayas
Olivier Assayas is a French film director and screenwriter.He made his debut in 1986, after directing some short films and writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.-Career:...
, the film features an international cast comprising Asia Argento
Asia Argento
Aria Asia Anna Maria Vittoria Rossa Argento is an Italian actress, singer, model and director.-Family and early life:...
, Michael Madsen
Michael Madsen
Michael Søren Madsen is an American actor, poet, and photographer. He has appeared in more than 150 films, most of them small independent films, though he has starred in central roles in such films as Reservoir Dogs, Free Willy, Donnie Brasco, and Kill Bill, in addition to a supporting role in Sin...
, Carl Ng
Carl Ng
Carl Ng is a Hong Kong actor and model. He is the son of Richard Ng.- Early life :The third of four children, Ng was born in Hong Kong and is of mixed ethnicity. His father is comedy actor Richard Ng, while his mother, a British woman, worked as a hair stylist for Bruce Lee in the 1970s...
and Kelly Lin
Kelly Lin
Kelly Lin Hsi-Lei is a Taiwanese actress and model who has appeared mainly in Hong Kong films.-Biography:Lin was born in Taiwan in 1975. She moved to Santa Barbara, California with her family at the age of 12. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a Degree in Economics...
. Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon
Kim Althea Gordon is an American musician, vocalist, artist, record producer, video director and actress. She has sung and played bass and guitar in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and in Free Kitten with Julia Cafritz...
, of the band Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...
, also plays a supporting role as an enigmatic businesswoman forced to intervene as events unfold in Hong Kong.
The film premiered 18 May at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival
2007 Cannes Film Festival
The 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the sixtieth, ran from 16 to 27 May 2007. Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights opened the festival, and Denys Arcand's The Age of Ignorance closed...
and later opened in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
on 22 August 2007.
Paris
After discussing his plans for retiring by selling on the shares in his security company to his debtors with his partner, André, aging underworld entrepreneur Miles Rennberg is paid a surprise visit at his Paris office by aggressive underworld mollGun moll
Gun moll is a term that refers to the female companion of a male professional criminal. In some contexts, gun moll more specifically suggests that the woman handles a firearm....
Sandra. Brazenly taunting him with her sexuality, she bluntly dissects their prior relationship - a nightmarish web of masochism, money, manipulation and dependency, pimping her out to dangerous clients in order to gain both a business advantage and perverse personal thrills.
She outlines her newest ambition, since their estrangement, of raising the necessary capital to run a nightclub in Beijing. Miles makes no pretense of the fact that he is less interested in the proposal than the woman, and encourages her to visit him at his apartment.
Without making any promises, Sandra leaves for her job at an import business, run by a young married couple: Lester and Sue Wong.
Sandra's own import sideline, drug running, is facilitated by her close bond of loyalty with low-ranking employee Lisa. Acting as her driver and lookout, Lisa escorts Sandra to the site of a drug deal that quickly goes sour when her buyer is revealed to be a Narcotics officer. Suspicious after Sandra's cool response to his earlier queries about a missing container in a recent shipment, Lester follows Sandra to the deal and accosts Lisa as she waits in the car. He sends Lisa away on his motorcycle and takes her place in the car.
After Sandra emerges, Lester drives her away from the scene. Expressing disappointment in her deceit, he takes her back to her apartment where it becomes clear that the two are romantically involved. After their sexual encounter, Lester receives a call from his wife and leaves.
Sandra appears to relent and arranges to visit Miles at his apartment. Goading him with recollections of their misdeeds, she reveals a deep-seated bitterness; she recalls, in particular, an incident where a group of Japanese clients she was entertaining drugged and raped her, and Miles' arousal at hearing the episode recounted in front of his girlfriend. They both drink and end up on the balcony. Sandra undresses and tries to instigate a violent sexual game, apparently of the genre they used to practice, by pinning Miles to the floor of the balcony and choking him with his own belt. Miles warns her off and leads her back inside to show her a pair of handcuffs, which he intends to use on her later in the evening. She expresses reluctance which he nonchalantly waves aside. When she tries to leave, he locks the door and pockets the keys.
After he takes a business call, she playfully restrains him with the handcuffs, then brutally shoots him in the head.
She quickly retraces her steps through the house, destroying evidence of her presence, and makes a swift exit with Miles' keys. Lester picks her up, gives her a modest sum of cash and the name of a contact in Hong Kong who will arrange her new life, promising to join her soon. Lisa first drives her to a club to establish an alibi, where the oppressive atmosphere and the noise provoke an aggressively traumatic and regretful response to her act.
Hong Kong
Hours behind Lisa, Sandra arrives in Hong Kong. She makes her way to the address of Lester's contact, who in turn sends her to a nondescript office somewhere else in the city. She is told that her contact is waiting for her in an adjacent room, but as soon as she enters the door is locked behind her. In the labyrinthine mess of the locked office she eventually discovers the bound and murdered body of Lisa in a chair facing the back wall.A manifestly wealthy, middle-aged Western woman arrives at the office and orders the men to bring Sandra out, chastising them for Lisa's death. Eventually, one of the men in the office is sent in after Sandra. Having switched clothes and positions with the corpse of Lisa, she manages to ambush the henchman and escape onto the streets. Whilst crossing on a ferry she cries over her last souvenir of her relationship with Miles, his keys, before dropping them into the water. With little money and no recourse to her credit cards or passport, due to risk of capture and extradition for Miles' murder, Sandra resorts to repeatedly calling Lester.
She eventually manages to contact his wife, Sue, who maintains that Lester is unavailable but agrees to meet Sandra in a karaoke club. Sue is evasive and aggressive, revealing that whilst she knew of Sandra's affair with Lester, Sandra was not her husband's first infidelity and he never really planned to leave his wife to join her. The whole venture was an attempt to raise the investment capital for the Beijing club, an enterprise in which Sue was fully complicit. Whilst she attempts to take everything in, Sue spikes Sandra's drink with a sedative.
In a back room, Sandra threatens Sue with a gun and demands more information; Sue pleads her innocence until she manages to talk Sandra into succumbing to the drug's sedative effects. She leaves Sandra unconscious on the floor. Sandra wakes in the home of the wealthy Western woman whom she escaped in the offices earlier. The woman explains that she owes someone a favour and sets Sandra up with papers and well-paid employment in Shanghai.
Nonetheless, Sandra eschews the easy escape and tracks Lester down in a Hong Kong shopping mall. She follows him up the staircase with an unsheathed knife, but as she prepares to stab him she is interrupted by a group of women coming the other way. Lester enters an expensive restaurant, meets with Miles' business partner, André, and leaves with a sports bag full of cash - possibly a payment for Miles' murder, which ensured that his shares did not pass to his unscrupulous creditors. Sandra follows Lester down to the doorway out to the car park, where he hesitates at the threshold as if aware of her presence. At the last moment, however, she finds herself unwilling to either kill or confront him. He drives away with the money.
Cast
- Asia ArgentoAsia ArgentoAria Asia Anna Maria Vittoria Rossa Argento is an Italian actress, singer, model and director.-Family and early life:...
as Sandra, a young woman working in an import-export agency under the guidance of Lester and Sue Wang. In the past, whilst involved with entrepreneur Miles Rennberg, Sandra manipulated and seduced difficult and dangerous business clients to elicit information from them. - Michael MadsenMichael MadsenMichael Søren Madsen is an American actor, poet, and photographer. He has appeared in more than 150 films, most of them small independent films, though he has starred in central roles in such films as Reservoir Dogs, Free Willy, Donnie Brasco, and Kill Bill, in addition to a supporting role in Sin...
as Miles Rennberg, an ostensibly wealthy, middle-aged entrepreneur who manages a successful security company with his partner André. He has accumulated a great deal of debt from unknown sources, which he plans to repay by retiring early and passing his shares on to his creditors. - Carl NgCarl NgCarl Ng is a Hong Kong actor and model. He is the son of Richard Ng.- Early life :The third of four children, Ng was born in Hong Kong and is of mixed ethnicity. His father is comedy actor Richard Ng, while his mother, a British woman, worked as a hair stylist for Bruce Lee in the 1970s...
as Lester Wang, a young Chinese man who runs an import-export agency with his wife Sue. He carries on an ambiguous affair with Sandra, his subordinate. - Kelly LinKelly LinKelly Lin Hsi-Lei is a Taiwanese actress and model who has appeared mainly in Hong Kong films.-Biography:Lin was born in Taiwan in 1975. She moved to Santa Barbara, California with her family at the age of 12. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a Degree in Economics...
as Sue - Alex Descas as André
- Kim GordonKim GordonKim Althea Gordon is an American musician, vocalist, artist, record producer, video director and actress. She has sung and played bass and guitar in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and in Free Kitten with Julia Cafritz...
as Kay - Joana Preiss as Lisa
Origins & Title
Writer-director Olivier AssayasOlivier Assayas
Olivier Assayas is a French film director and screenwriter.He made his debut in 1986, after directing some short films and writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.-Career:...
cites the inspiration of the film's driving themes as a news story relating the murder of financier Édouard Stern
Edouard Stern
Édouard Stern was a Jewish banker who lived in France. Born in Paris, he was son of the banker Antoine Jean Elie Stern and Christiane Laroche, and was a personal friend of French President Nicolas Sarkozy...
during an S&M
Sadism and masochism
Sadomasochism broadly refers to the receiving of pleasure—often sexual—from acts involving the infliction or reception of pain or humiliation. The name originates from two authors on the subject, Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch...
play session at the hands of his long-term lover, prostitute Cecile Brossard. The incident evoked the tone of his previous work on corporate deviancy, "Demonlover
Demonlover
Demonlover is a 2002 technological neo-noir thriller film by French writer/director Olivier Assayas. The film stars Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, and Gina Gershon with a musical score by Sonic Youth...
", and he determined to use it as the pivotal event for a new script.
The title Boarding Gate was the director's second choice for the film. His first, departed - a reference to the passport stamp applied by Hong Kong border officials upon leaving the country - had to be scrapped during filming upon the 2006 release of Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
's The Departed
The Departed
The Departed is a 2006 American crime thriller film, fashioned as a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. The film was directed by Martin Scorsese and written by William Monahan...
. The final title was selected since it evokes the many easy conduits in the film, "the idea of a passage between two worlds."
Budget
The film's style, described as "Eurotrash," is - according to Assayas - an experiment in "constructing a project around B-movie economics".Assayas decided to embark on the "B-movie" concept after frustrating financial complications interminably delayed production of another of his projects, intended to be "a very French film focusing on provincial life;" similar circumstances led to making of his previous film with Maggie Cheung
Maggie Cheung
Maggie Cheung Man yuk is a Chinese actress from Hong Kong. Raised in England and Hong Kong, she has over 70 films to her credit since starting her career in 1983...
, Irma Vep
Irma Vep
Irma Vep is a 1996 film directed by the French director Olivier Assayas, starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung in a story about the disasters that ensue as a middle-aged French film director attempts to remake Louis Feuillade's classic silent film serial Les vampires...
. The total cost of the film was under €2 million.
Filming
The film was shot over six weeks in just two locations: Paris and Hong Kong. The Hong Kong crew was entirely local, with the exception of the cinematographer, the sound engineer, the assistant, the script supervisor, the line producer and the director himself. Most of the filming was done with hand-held cameras, and Assayas admits to having obtained some of his shots illegally due to the restrictive nature of local permits. These "guerrilla shots" were conducted with a skeleton crew of only four members, who quickly fled the scene afterwards.The local team was also of such an unwieldy size that Assayas frequently invented projects or errands simply to clear the set.
Casting
Lead actress Asia ArgentoAsia Argento
Aria Asia Anna Maria Vittoria Rossa Argento is an Italian actress, singer, model and director.-Family and early life:...
was considered by the director to be "inseparable from the narrative"; protagonist Michael Madsen
Michael Madsen
Michael Søren Madsen is an American actor, poet, and photographer. He has appeared in more than 150 films, most of them small independent films, though he has starred in central roles in such films as Reservoir Dogs, Free Willy, Donnie Brasco, and Kill Bill, in addition to a supporting role in Sin...
was cast later via a mutual association with Nick Nolte
Nick Nolte
Nicholas King "Nick" Nolte is an American actor whose career has spanned over five decades, peaking in the 1990s when his commercial success made him one of the most popular celebrities of that decade.-Early life:...
, as Assayas conducted a search for an actor suited to the physical properties of the role. The scenes documenting their relationship, from the reunion after their long and awkward estrangement to the murder in his apartment, were shot in chronological order. Their first meeting was on camera, during the shoot of the reunion scene. Assayas remarks on Madsen's unpredictability as an actor, contributing his own small touches to his scenes. The choreography in the scene of violent sex play on Miles' balcony involving strangulation with a belt, for example, was vastly expanded by Madsen's suggestions.
Kelly Lin
Kelly Lin
Kelly Lin Hsi-Lei is a Taiwanese actress and model who has appeared mainly in Hong Kong films.-Biography:Lin was born in Taiwan in 1975. She moved to Santa Barbara, California with her family at the age of 12. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a Degree in Economics...
and Carl Ng
Carl Ng
Carl Ng is a Hong Kong actor and model. He is the son of Richard Ng.- Early life :The third of four children, Ng was born in Hong Kong and is of mixed ethnicity. His father is comedy actor Richard Ng, while his mother, a British woman, worked as a hair stylist for Bruce Lee in the 1970s...
, playing the ambitious Wong couple, were selected as good examples of the "new generation" of actors working in the Hong Kong film industry. Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon
Kim Althea Gordon is an American musician, vocalist, artist, record producer, video director and actress. She has sung and played bass and guitar in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and in Free Kitten with Julia Cafritz...
, whose acting roles had been considerably undemanding before Boarding Gate, had worked with Assayas previously with the music for Irma Vep
Irma Vep
Irma Vep is a 1996 film directed by the French director Olivier Assayas, starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung in a story about the disasters that ensue as a middle-aged French film director attempts to remake Louis Feuillade's classic silent film serial Les vampires...
and Demonlover
Demonlover
Demonlover is a 2002 technological neo-noir thriller film by French writer/director Olivier Assayas. The film stars Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, and Gina Gershon with a musical score by Sonic Youth...
. Based on her experience of living in Hong Kong in her youth and on her desire to further her acting career, Assayas cast her in a supporting role.
Themes and Significance
Wayne State UniversityWayne State University
Wayne State University is a public research university located in Detroit, Michigan, United States, in the city's Midtown Cultural Center Historic District. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering more than 400 major subject areas to over 32,000 graduate and...
professor of English Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro is an American cultural critic. His most widely read book is Doom Patrols, a "theoretical fiction" that outlines the state of postmodernism during the early 1990s, using poetic language, personal anecdotes, and creative prose....
, author of The Cinematic Body, has composed a lengthy essay on the themes of conduits and interchangeability in the world of global capitalism as they are explored and visualized in Boarding Gate.
Reception
The film has garnered mixed to negative reviews. Review aggregator Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reported that 26% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 39 reviews. Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
reported the film had an average score of 47 out of 100, based on 15 reviews.
Marketed as an "erotic noir-thriller", the film incited some tough criticism for its more explicit content, which explores earning it the title of "a limp, sleazy inanity" with "a whiff of voyeuristic self-indulgence" in Variety's
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
review of the film. Even the more positive pieces comment on this, such as Slant Magazine's
Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine is an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New York Film Festival.- History :...
review by David Pratt-Robinson that remarks that lead actress Asia Argento "looks ready to rape anything in sight".
The film's acting inspired a wide range of critical opinion, although the view that Asia Argento is one of the most appealing aspects of Boarding Gate is nearly universal. The Village Voices J. Hoberman takes this common remark to its extreme, when juxtaposed with a scathing review of the film - "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."
Several reviews go as far as to imply that it is the inevitable product of the actress' own provocative attitude rather than simply a performance. Manohla Dargis, praising Argento's performance as striking, notes that her "on-screen ferocity" only nearly rivals her prominent tattoos and "the ease with which she sheds her clothes, which explains why I can describe those tattoos with confidence." Describing her as "aggressively carnal", New York Magazine's David Edelstein makes the wry remark that he "can’t help thinking there was a mix-up at the hospital and her dad was Klaus Kinski."
David Pratt-Robinson had a positive take on the character: "so fierce and so fragile,... a global misfit, a citizen of the world who can't quite find her place...yet, somehow, she makes the idea of being in transit feel like home." Whilst criticizing her general approach to acting as "bluffing her way through", The New Yorker's David Denby similarly describes Sandra as "lewd and hungry, but she’s not boring — the character keeps changing, and you can see Argento’s mind working behind all the viperish moves."
Little attention is generally given to other performances, summarized by Variety in the phrase "cast, whether native English speakers or not, woodenly recite their lines." However, Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon
Kim Althea Gordon is an American musician, vocalist, artist, record producer, video director and actress. She has sung and played bass and guitar in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and in Free Kitten with Julia Cafritz...
's "god-awful cameo" as businesswoman Kay is frequently singled out for criticism. She "gives one of the worst musician-turned-actor turns in recent memory," according to Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News.
Boarding Gate was placed at 83 on Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine is an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New York Film Festival.- History :...
's best films of the 2000s.
External links
- The Pinocchio Theory essay on Boarding Gate by Steven ShaviroSteven ShaviroSteven Shaviro is an American cultural critic. His most widely read book is Doom Patrols, a "theoretical fiction" that outlines the state of postmodernism during the early 1990s, using poetic language, personal anecdotes, and creative prose....
- Memento Films press release for Boarding Gate, including an interview with Olivier Assayas
- Trailer at IGNIGNIGN is an entertainment website that focuses on video games, films, music and other media. IGN's main website comprises several specialty sites or "channels", each occupying a subdomain and covering a specific area of entertainment...