Boarding Gate (2007)

You won't be disappointed!

Strong and Moving!

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This is not quite as muddled as made out to be, but it's not any kind of Hong Kong pistol stuff that it may appear to be based on plot and cast either. It's the kind of film that presents itself as a thriller but is actually about people and the structure.It's a two-part complex. The first part plays like an emotional upskirt peek at the tormented soul of this woman, who loved at the hands of a man who tossed and toyed her around for pleasure. She's played by Asia Argento who so effortlessly can channel sex mixed with pain - one of her early film roles after all was back in Italy for father Dario, where she falls victim to a serial rapist. We get some stuff about drugs, pistols are whipped out then forgotten again.Now the French touch, our first pointer about what it's all really about; she becomes the character she has written about, a fictional sci-fi woman who controls men. Tables are switched, and turns out she was really manipulating this whole time from inside the image he had been used to subdue. For the second part we fly down to Hong Kong where it threatens again to become a thriller. Pistols are whipped out again and forgotten once more. Here we come to understand that she's fallen prey to another lover controlling her for own purposes. There's another woman who is also vying for control of her strings, a sexual antagonist.So having consummated one desire about revenge, she is not one step closer to being a free person. Her present suffering is still bound to that first violence that was a sexual desire; this is given to us as having been raped in her sleep, and so the horrible hurt of an unconscious drive, repressed, felt to be beyond any control and so any responsibility. Aptly enough, this second part is about self-discovery then; she's vulnerable for the first time, no more games or roles, conceding to flow where it may.It is film noir as far as world dynamics go, make no mistake. To pursue desire is to be trapped helpless in a self-generating chimera.Usually in noir that desire was codified as the femme fatale and who is here our protagonist but rendered as an image, a fictional guise, full of cracks suggesting the distraught person behind.Finally she follows this second manipulative lover so that it can be revealed to us who was pulling the strings from behind all this time. She gets a second chance for revenge. The final image is one of poignant beauty, as blurry, out-of-focus for the world of plotting and machinations that we felt as the film, she ascends out of view liberated. She is literally no longer part of the film that was pure deceit from the start.So for all intents and purposes, it should have been a great film about karmic cycles. It's not quite, but only because, for some reason, this was felt that should also appeal to a broad audience. So, it's filmed in a syncopated manner that is associated with TV, which makes sense in context because the camera is meant to be a frantic eye searching for things as she is, but which probably threw a curveball at those who usually expect a character study in long painterly sweeps and would be otherwise rewarded here.It didn't help that it came out in the same year as No Country, another post-noir, much more overtly cinematic, and a host of other well-received films. So not a groundbreaking film, but see it if it shows up.

A quality star can equal quite a mighty fine draw for a film, even with unpromising reviews. So it was that I picked up Boarding Gate, since it stars the great Asia Argento. Interesting cast members and a workable sounding plot, it could have been a contender. Unfortunately though, things don't really end up working out in any way here. Argento here plays a former prostitute, rekindling a steamy romance with a former lover, all the while pursuing her own dodgy dealings. Ultimately she ends up deeper than she can handle in somewhat of a muddle of deception and murder, leading to meagre near glimmers of suspense. It has some solid potential as a set up, a strong willed and highly sexual lady, bringing all her charms to bear on the task of making her own way in a world that seeks to constrain and control but finding out that things are a whole lot trickier than she first imagined, it should be sexy, thrilling and perhaps a little sad. Flickers of all these faintly pass through the film as it lazily swims to its pat conclusion but nothing ever really works. The writing is for the most part undercooked, some sexual dialogue carries a mild frisson but thats about it, for the most part characters are vapid, motivations are ill considered and plotting is a dull haze, inconsequential and lacking in interest. Direction is similar to the writing (Olivier Assayas responsible for both), that is to say weak. Acting wise only Argento stands out, mixing tough and sizzling with shades of vulnerability she does pretty well, especially in scenes with Michael Madsen as her ex lover, who comes off with some dignity by playing the same way he seems to in most of his work. They have very little chemistry so the scenes aren't hot in the way they were intended, but they are slightly interesting. Carl Ng and Kelly Lin are bland and forgettable as the other notable players in the drama, while some amusement for alt rock fans is to be found in a cameo appearance from Kim Gordon, who doesn't have much to do but is somewhat fun to see anyway. Not really much more to say about this one as its a bit tricky to get too much into without spoilers and not much of note happens anyway, for me it was mostly a bit of a dog, suspense free and boring though pleasant enough to look at. I've seen a lot worse, but for being overwhelmingly underwhelming, 3/10.

This is one of the great "Who gives a bleep!" movies of all time. Most of the film isn't really that bad, but it never gives you a reason to care what happens to any of characters or wonder how the story will turn out.Sandra (Asia Argento) used to be a prostitute in love with rich and screwed up investment banker Miles (Michael Madsen). They used to have depraved sex and Miles also used Sandra to have sex with other businessmen to get inside information from them. That so-called relationship ended and now Sandra works for Lester and Sue Wang (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin), helping manage their import/export business. Sandra also works for herself, smuggling drugs inside the Wang's shipments and selling those drugs with the help of her apparent friend Lisa (Joanne Preiss). After one of Sandra's drug deals goes bad, Lester inexplicably shows up to help her out, somebody ends up dead and Sandra flees to Singapore, where someone else ends up dead and people try to kill her until a blonde (Kim Gordon) playing the part of Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction shows up to solve all of Sandra's immediate problems.This is an excruciatingly boring movie. If you're not fidgeting in your seat, wishing for it to be over before it's even halfway done, you'd have to be either stoned out of your mind or dead. But Boarding Gate isn't boring because the acting is flat or the plot is lame or anything like that. Most of the dialog is fairly ridiculous and there's a silly twist in the middle, but a lot of Oliver Assayas' work is fairly decent. The story is okay and the movie looks fine. None of the actors embarrass themselves, or anything like that. However, nothing that happens in this movie to any of the characters matters at all, because you don't care if they succeed or fail, live or die.Sandra is the star of this story. She's the one we're supposed to identify with, the one we worry about when she's threatened or in danger. The movie, though, only defines her as a drug-dealing, former prostitute. We're given nothing else about Sandra and how she came to be this person. The film doesn't even seem to care if Sandra is good or bad. She's just the star and the audience is expected to care about her. I t's as though Assayas looked at Argento and was so blinded by what he saw, he thinks everyone else will be just as blind. I can see fine, though, and Argento's nothing special.That applies to the other characters in the film as well. Carl Ng and Kelly Lin try hard to pump some genuine emotion into Lester and Sue, but it's so unconnected to anything in the story that it just makes Lester and Sue seem weird and overexcited. Miles is, essentially, Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen. If you like Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll enjoy his time on screen. If you want anything more than Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll be greatly disappointed.There are three points where the movie tries to make us care about these people. Sandra and Miles have two unbelievably long and pointless scenes where they spout unmemorable and obviously contrived dialog at each other and Sandra and Sue have their own scene that's not quite as long but just as useless. I think the conversations are supposed to give us insight into these people but they really just dwell on a lot of the backstory to this movie and run over some exposition. These scenes tell us nothing about Sandra, Miles or Sue that isn't readily apparent from the moment we encounter them.Argento goes topless at one point and rubs her crotch at another. Those moments make you think Boarding Gate is going to be one of those exploitive, sex-and-guns, late-night-cable thrillers. That's all the sex in the movie, though, and there's not much more violence. It's like Assayas thought he could take the script for a crude and prurient melodrama and "class it up" enough to make it a serious drama. He couldn't, which leaves this movie in a weird limbo. If you could relate to these characters as real people, you might be interested in what happens to them. But since you can't relate to them, all you can focus on is how the story manages to be both pretentious and uneventful.

"Boarding Gate" is an initially verbose French crime drama that, for the first half at least, threatens to talk itself and us to a standstill. Luckily, at about the midway point, the pacing picks up considerably and it turns into a stylish, gripping thriller.The film chronicles the stormy relationship between an unscrupulous businessman and the ex-mistress he routinely pimps out to his clients. However, it's only after she's lured into committing murder and forced to go on the lam to Hong Kong that the movie becomes an intriguing, multi-layered look at infidelity and betrayal.Italian actress Asia Argento, who's a dead-ringer for Uma Thurman, commands the screen with her pouting eroticism and natural charisma, and she gets strong support from Michael Madsen and Carl Ng as the two main men in her life, as well as from Kelly Lin as a romantic rival who reluctantly helps Argento out in the end. The direction by Olivier Assayas - in the second half at least - is crisp, focused and exciting, and the visuals alone are enough to compensate for some of the gaping holes in the storyline.One caveat, however: while technically a French movie, most of the dialogue is actually in English. However, there are times when the movie unaccountably lapses into un-subtitled French and Chinese, leaving the audience in the dark as to a few, possibly crucial, details in the story - proving yet again that a picture is not necessarily always worth a thousand words.