Clean

[Chris Knipp]

Since my review of Clean has disappeared from FilmWurld and my website reviews aren't available right now, here's a copy. When I say Maggie Cheung's part was "written expressly for her," that may be an exaggeration in view of Assayas' policy of letting actors fend for themselves. Maybe I should say "made available expressly to her."

Olivier Assayas: Clean (2004)

Rock melodrama gives fragmented depiction of recovery

Clean from what? Drugs, of course.

In this complex and ambitious new film by Olivier Assayas, in a part written expressly for her, his ex-wife the HongKong and international megastar Maggie Cheung plays Emily, a "rock widow," whose musician main squeeze OD's near a Canadian steel mill. Afterwards in sorrow she gets high on the same drugs and sits all night in an old American car staring at the ruined landscape while we listen to big sweeping passages from Brian Eno. Six months later when she gets out of prison for possession, she seeks out her in-laws in Vancouver, who're raising a little boy she had with the late husband. The grandpa is Nick Nolte. She wants to start a new life and be allowed to take over the care of her son. In a painful effort to recreate herself, she opts for Paris because London has "too many memories" -- only it's "trop de souvenirs" now, because the multilingual Cheung has switched necessarily to French. Later Emily is hired as the manager of a new Printemps store "for active women." Eventually she gets to see Nolte and little Jay (James Dennis), who both come over to Paris from London where they've gone from Vancouver (lots of travel in Clean) to get tests and treatments for Grandma.

During the movie's most touching scene, in the Vincennes Zoo with the boy, Emily manages a heart to heart chat that convinces him she's not why his dad died -- and might deserve to be his full-time mom. As the movie ends she's gathered the courage to return to North America and record a song in a San Francisco studio.

Emily has but one purpose: to remake herself -- to become "clean" -- so that she may have her little boy back. That is so simple, and it's all that keeps her going. But although this film deals with far more basic human material than Assayas' last film demonlover it does so in a rather distracting, curiously detached sort of way. Assayas seems to like chaos; perhaps he is a little too distracted by the complexities in the life of a woman who after all has become very focused. The Canadian scenes in the opening segment have a kind of gritty trashiness. The opening conflicts between Emily and her husband and music people are confusing and disturbing; they're not exposition -- but then they are: they show a lifestyle about to implode. Brian Eno's music provides a desolate background for the already bluntly metaphorical dark satanic mills (Assayas may mean the stark steel foundary to stand for the music industry) and for the ugly quarrel between Emily and her husband, and the image of the car at down is memorable. Thereafter, a bewildering series of scenes follows, whose frenetic sequence may echo the heroine's disturbed state, but does not convey much sense of her as a person. Any emotional intensity the story might have is weakened by the frenetic switching of countries and milieux, by the movie's sheer busy-ness.. Cheung handles all this well, but the result is a performance that is more interesting than involving. She's forced to spend so much time shuffling around from place to place and scene to scene that her experience loses the emotional intensity, the focus on inner experience, that it might have had if she'd been allowed to stay put. The colorful and rich mises en scène don't make up for, and in fact detract from, the homeliness of Emily's rehab story. Most of what goes on in rebuilding a life is interior and that's hard to show in a film. "Fake it till you make it" is an important recovery slogan describing the early 12-step process: but if an actress accurately reproduces the effect of "faking it" the effect is necessarily going to be chilly and artificial. Finally Maggie Cheung may be, at least in this her European/western persona, too composed and self-possessed a person to illustrate the sufferings of drug rehabilitation.

Released in Paris in September after a Cannes Festival showing where it got Maggie Cheung the Best Actress award -- perhaps more a sign of her well-deserved cult following than of anything compelling about her performance in this more plot-driven, colorful, but in many ways still detached effort from Assayas. He too, like his "muse" Maggie, has passionate admirers. demonlover won avid fans despite the fact that it self-destructs halfway through, and American aficionados will be disappointed that as Variety writer David Rooney wrote from Cannes in May, "a marginal commercial profile appears likely" for Clean in the US.

Also shown at the Toronto Film Festival.

Clean is in a mixture of French and English (like demonlover) -- this time with a dash of Cantonese Chinese. The Chinese comes in when she waitresses in a big restaurant for a while in Paris before her interview with Printemps.

Le Monde called this "un grand mélo, version rock." They mean this as a compliment. French critical response was extremely positive. On Allociné.com, only one of the major French papers is listed as giving Clean fewer than three stars. How often do viewers -- even professional ones -- decide what they think of a film before it's even been screened?

[pmw]

Just wanted to put this in a easily recognizable spot. The Oscar-Journal thread is starting to look like one of those station wagons you see from time to time stuffed full of a life-long collection of bric-a-brac (not that it isn't great in that way).

By the way, when did your Clean thread disappear? Was that during last years down days?
P

[Chris Knipp]

I don't know. I couldn't find it here. And as I said, something has gone terribly wrong for now with the "forum" setup where I post my reviews on my own website. I am going to have to get a web person to help me restore it, and it may be laborious putting back the latest ones. I hope I can get it back up soon before people decide my website is dead.

If people are watching Clean now in this country, I hope we can have a more general discussion of it.

Though I may sound critical of Clean and am somewhat underwhelmed by the charismatic Cheung's performance in it, of Assayas' recent films this is by far my favorite. I may have been more critical as a corrective to the overwhelming praise at Cannes and in France that I mention in my review and that all of us who have followed the film's history are aware of, and I continue to feel while Clean is definitely memorable and in places beautiful and almost everywhere visually rich, it is more "complex and ambitous" than involving.

Another thing: if it's about getting "clean" from heroin to the extent that that's even the title, why is there so little about the actual process of drug rehabilitation as experienced by real everyday addicts? -- in short, where and how does it show us Emily getting clean and making a strenuous effort to stay clean? Having been there myself a bit (though not with anything quite as heavy as heroin), this is something I really look for an honest and accurate treatment of.

[oscar jubis]

You raise relevant issues, Chris. Obviously, the title creates certain expectations. We've been conditioned by previous treatments of the theme to expect withdrawal scenes, but Emily's withdrawal happens in prison and Assayas doesn't go there. Maybe he thinks we've seen so many such scenes they've become a "cliche", and maybe Assayas is right. But I don't remember any scene in which she is tempted to use again, which is odd. The specter of recidivism never rears its ugly head, again, as far as my memory serves me right. But I found Emily's challenge to deal with her son's accusation and to earn Grandpa Nolte's trust both compelling and "involving".

[Chris Knipp]

Exactly it's the temptation to use again when the going gets tough, and the issue of what the recovering addict uses to deal with these times -- meetings, a sponsor, a recovery program, a new set of values, a support group? Or is she just white-knuckling it, in which case the chances of recidivism are stronger? The whole process of getting "clean" isn't treated realistically; in fact, it isn't even treated at all. It's just taken as a fait accompli, and Emily's job is just to establish her cred as a "straight" person by holding down some good jobs and convincing the family that she can be trusted -- which is certainly very relevent, and I can grant you that those moments can be considered involving, but that thread doesn't specifically refer to the title topic of being "clean" per se. It's true that scenes re drug recovery or addiction have become a cliché, but that's because they're cliché treatments, not accurate ones. I don't believe the process of recovery, of getting and staying clean, has really been accurately represented on film that often, though there are some examples, not, of course, as chic and beautiful as Assayas' film. Perhaps Assayas is using getting and staying "clean" as a metaphor for living a new life, remaking oneself, which the bulk of the film seems to be about, but is that quite fair to the tremendously important issue of drug addiction?

[oscar jubis]

Yes, perhaps "clean" is being used as a metaphor. Perhaps it isn't fair to Assayas to evaluate his film as one being about drug addiction. But also, perhaps it isn't wise to call your film "clean" and have the audience introduced to your film's protagonist while she's still an active junkie, unless you intend to deal squarely with drug addiction.

[Chris Knipp]

Of course "getting clean" from drugs is living a new life, so the distinction is rather meaningless; the Maggie Cheung character is a recovering drug addict and she's trying to live a new life: what's the difference, wherein lies the metaphor? It pretty much has to be taken literally as well as metaphorically; there's no real distinction. Emily's efforts to reestablish herself with credibility as a responsible person so she can have custody of her son are just things any recovering drug addict would do. It's just that the film bypasses some of the practical nitty gritty aspects of what the story by its very nature contains; the issue of how she deals with cravings as a heroin addict are forgotten in favor of other matters which perhaps the director knows more about. You can't say "it's just a metaphor" when the literal element is indicated from the start. Something works well as a metaphor when it's done convincingly on the literal level as well.

Speaking of reestablishing, I got my website movie reviews back, but due to lack of a host archive of recent databases I had to reenter the last thirty of them one by one, a tedious task indeed. Live and learn.