Boarding Gate

 Boarding Gate (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from freefall-productions.com on 02/11/20)

2007 / France / 106 minutes

“I just came here to see what obsessed me so much. I can’t see it now- it’s gone.”

Director: Olivier Assayas / Screenplay: Olivier Assayas / Director of Photography: Yorick Le Saux / Music: Various Artists / Production: Francois Margolin for Margo Films / Cast: Asia Argento (Sandra), Michael Madsen (Miles Rennberg), Kelly Lin (Sue Wang), Carl Ng (Lester Wang), Kim Gordon (Kay), Alex Descas (Andrew), Joanna Preiss (Lisa).

Olivier Assayas’s Boarding Gate has the feel of a film you’ve started watching halfway through and somehow makes that a good thing. At the beginning, the audience is thrown straight into the lives of characters we haven’t been “Properly” introduced to in the midst of a plot that’s already been going on for a while. And while there are a few answers by the end for those paying attention, they aren’t really the point.

   Instead, Boarding Gate focuses on atmosphere, style and character. Following former high level sex worker turned corporate spy Sandra (a particularly mesmerising Asia Argento, carrying almost an entire film by herself) throughout, the film delves into a murky world of industrial espionage and personal betrayal across international borders.

   Working for Chinese power couple Lester and Su Wang (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin) in Paris, Sandra is also simultaneously running her own drug smuggling operation through their import company and conducting an affair with Lester. The film begins with her apparently trying to rekindle a previous relationship with boorish American business type Miles Rennberg (Michael Madsen) but is really doing so on Lester’s orders.

   Visiting Rennberg in his apartment, we see that Sandra is visibly conflicted about whatever her real purpose there is. Throughout a lengthy sequence, they drink and discuss their time together until Rennberg becomes abusive and refuses to let Sandra leave. After trying to talk herself out of it several times, Sandra reveals her true mission when she shoots him dead and flees the scene.

   Helped to escape the country by Lester and his assistant Lisa (Joanna Preiss), Sandra flies to Hong Kong where she’s told to seek out a contact who will pay her and give her everything she needs to “Disappear”. But upon arrival at the address she’s given, she finds Lisa dead and only narrowly escapes a group of hitmen herself. Alone and unable to contact Lester, Sandra eventually meets the mysterious Kay (Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon) and is reunited with Sue as she attempts to find out who’s working for who and what’s really going on.

   Boarding Gate dispassionately observes it’s desperate, deliberately vaguely defined characters through documentary- style digital video and most definitely doesn’t care about how likeable they come across or how easy it is to make sense of their actions. Rennberg’s pretty clearly established as a right bastard who most likely deserves his fate but it’s only as the fractured narrative progresses that we realise just how unstable Sandra is too.

   Argento expertly sells each of the character’s sudden transformations, from loyal corporate servant to manipulative seductress and from volatile murderess to traumatised survivor. The film’s main theme is identity and how it can be distorted and erased, with it’s interconnected international treacheries all presented completely non- judgmentally.

   In the end, Sandra realises that she broke free of one of one abusive controller only to have him immediately replaced by another and that in a world of constant surveillance and permanent records following us everywhere to keep the capital flowing, actual human lives are not valued very highly (Lisa’s death is so shocking because she’s the closest the film has to an innocent character and is completely routinely- and pretty much accidentally- murdered because of a communication mix- up).

   By this point fluent and able to act in French in addition to Italian and English, Argento had had a great run of success- at least to outward appearances- since New Rose Hotel. In her early thirties here, her accent’s no longer as strong and her voice is deeper but Sandra could almost be New Rose’s Sandii a decade later given their similar names and specialities (if you allow for the older film’s near future setting becoming an alternate past instead).

   In the intervening years, Argento had made her British debut in Michael Radford’s (the 1984 version of 1984) B Monkey in 1998 then gone on to star opposite Vin Ordinaire in xXx (2002), her single foray into Hollywood action blockbuster territory, in which she acted everyone else off the screen and introduced at least some of the US teen target audience to more interesting European fare.

   Most impressive though, was her own daringly devastating and raw as fuck directorial debut Scarlet Diva (2000), a fearless sex, drugs and Rock and Roll personal exorcism that will properly blow you away with it’s no holds barred emotional intensity and visceral grip. Straight after Boarding Gate, she worked with Abel Ferrara again on Go Go Tales (2007) and later took a completely silent lead role in Stefano Chiantini’s hypnotic Italian drama, Isole (2011).

   In the later ’10’s Argento became a leading figure in the “Me Too” movement and was among the first of several high profile actresses to publicly accuse the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault (her “Weinstein Incident” had taken place during the production of B Monkey and a fictionalised version of it is depicted in Scarlet Diva).