Oh is there anything we love more that drug addiction movies?! NOTHING! Ah. So wonderfully satisfying. So voyeuristic. So “Thank God I Never Got Hooked on Heroin.” Personally, I’m over these films. I was over them five years ago. They will keep coming though. And as cinephiles, we have to deal with that. The latest entry is Clean, the story of a washed-up music industry diva attempting to put her life back together in order to become a fit mother for her young son.
The film is saturated in realness and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s got that edgy yet ethereal feeling you hope every small film will solicit and few ever do. Writer/Director Olivier Assayas oddly enough creates a drug addiction pic devoid of sentimentality or overt judgment. This, I was pretty sure, was impossible. So my hats are off to him. The rest of my clothes will also go off to him for writing and carefully crafting this film around/for his ex-wife Maggie Cheung. Any two people that work together creatively after breaking up are heroes of mine.
Cheung is usually an otherworldly presence in her films but here she touches down to earth. In Clean, she gives positively pedestrian performance which makes me question her award of Best Actress at Cannes last year. Don’t get me wrong. The perf is completely at home with Assayas’ ultra-“it’s happening right now” style. His mise-en-scene is well-choreographed to appear real and I would venture to say that Cheung’s performance is exactly that: well-choreographed. It’s like watching a goddess pretend to be a human being for two hours. It’s indeed convincing but not entirely satisfying.
Nick Nolte shows up for no reason. I felt his scenes with Cheung were stilted. There’s a beginning-middle-end which I’m grateful for and the individual scenes ebb and flow with the rest of the piece like long heartbroken sighs. All in all, the film's raison d'etre leans too much on Cheung's straightforward portrayal which simply doesn't impress as much as one would hope.
Bottom Line: Cheung fans will enjoy. Writer/Directors should definitely check it out. The rest of you... you'll be bored.
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