Oliver Assayas’ latest film Boarding Gate has gotten mostly negative reviews but being a fan of his work I decided to see it anyways and I’m happy to report that I actually liked it quite a bit. The film tells the noir-esque story of an ex-corporate whore of sorts named Sandra (played by the fabulous Asia Argento) as she comes back into the life of one time lover and employer Miles (Michael Madsen). We meet them after their love has ended, after the passion is gone and after the whoring out of Sandra to Miles’ clients has stopped.

From here we go on a very Assayas journey to the apartment of Miles for a deadly S&M session, to transient airports and finally to the streets and warehouses of Hong Kong. Along the way we meet businessmen and business women, although like Miles and Sandra we never really know what they’re doing. The cast speaks awkward English as they talk about their business ventures in overly general ways and text each other.

But this is not a film about plot, the specifics of the business that has Sandra traveling and chasing men is irrelevant. As online critic Daniel Kasman points out:

But I think Assayas is working another tack, abstracting his filmmaking as he opens his film up globally and asks very vital questions about the validity and believability of film in our time. He finds a kind of emptiness and bankruptcy in method and ultimately in content in a very different international context than the films of the 1940s. By the end, when Asia needs to make a choice about love and money and honor, she walks away, and this is not due to some moral awakening that has occurred during her tumultuous experience crossing countries, fleeing spaces, and jumbling her senses, but rather a realization that neither love nor money mean anything anymore in the context of our New World.

The film itself realizes a great emptiness that it has tried to fight, tried to find a core in, jumping from the money, to the heart, to the sex, to the action, to the exotic, and finally to a lesson, and found nothing, nothing at all. Except, perhaps, the identification of a need for something, something to fill that gap. [D-Kaz]

The film is by no means perfect, but it’s that emptiness in the world today in connection to money, to technology and to capitalism in general that helps Boarding Gate to succeed. Asia is of course wonderful and watching her go on this meaningless but seemingly action packed journey and relay the nothingness of it all in her eyes, is pretty powerful.

The trailer is below and because Assayas always manages to bring up spiked drinks in his films, and learn about Take Back the Night, a group that works to combat rape and abuse in the lives of women.