Clean (2004) is a movie by Olivier Assayas, director of as Paris, je t’aime (2006), takes us on a journey into the hard world of the music business and drugs. Clean stars Maggie Cheung in her award winning role as Emily Wang, girlfriend and heroin addict of a struggling rocker and fellow junkie, Lee Hauser (played by James Johnson). After breaking off a potential gig in Canada, both travel back to their hotel. They both argue about how she is blamed for Lee’s continuing failures and she ends up leaving for the night and gets high in an empty parking lot. The next morning when Emily returns, the police are in the room where Lee was found dead of a drug overdose. The police arrest her when she attempts to get into the room and discover a couple of bags of heroin in her purse.
Emily is sentenced to six months in prison and when she is released, she is briefly reunited with Lee’s father Albrecht (played by Nick Nolte). Albrecht also takes care of Emily and Lee’s son Jay (played by James Dennis) whom they left behind in Vancouver. He goes over what is left of their finances and tells her that the court has awarded custody of Jay to him and his wife, Rosemary (played by Martha Henry). Knowing the predicament that she is in, Albrecht is sympathetic, but taking Jay’s best interests first, he tells Emily to stay away until she can straighten herself out. Emily travels to Paris a few weeks later to build a new life for herself and we see her struggle through the abandonment by friends and family. Upon hitting rock bottom, we finally see her turn around to achieve her ultimate goal: to see her son again and getting another opportunity for a career in music.
Maggie Cheung won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 for this role. This was an award well deserved. In a movie that spans two continents (Canada and Europe) and three languages (English, French and Chinese), Ms. Cheung has outdone herself. We see her as the narcissistic addict, going through a cold turkey recovery and finally as the vulnerable mother.
Academy Award nominee Nick Nolte, who in real life is a drug addict, does well in his role. The character he plays, Albrecht, is both sensitive and strong, but also caring grandfather and fatherly figure to Emily as he helps her rebuild her life. One of the best scenes in which he displays his sensitive and strong side was after he finds out that Lee has died and his wife and grandson come home and startled, immediately jumps up and cannot speak, but has to tell Rosemary. Overall Albrecht is much more forgiving of Emily than Rosemary, who blames her for the death of their son.
Assayas’ film is one of the best independent films that I’ve seen. He brought together a great team of actors, most notably of which was Nick Nolte. He even went as far as going to the music business to include real-life musicians such as Tricky and the band Metric and music producer David Roback, who all have brief cameos in the film. With their involvement, this makes the film more believable. Even Maggie Cheung herself sings a couple of songs. All are connected to the states of which her character she plays is in throughout the movie: chaotic, through the song by the Metric, “Dead Disco”, recovery through her own song “She Can’t Tell You”, then finally at the end as she obtains the future for her and her son with “Wait For Me”. The instrumental music is also notable, with contributors such as Brian Eno, who featured portions of the same score from 28 Days Later in this film, Tricky and David Roback.
The cinematography, done by the award winning cinematographer Eric Gautier, was extraordinary and symbolic. In the beginning titles with the factories blowing out smoke out of the smoke towers and then again, with the addition of the explosion, in the scene where Emily gets high is a connection of the environment to Emily, who was becoming more “unclean”. At the end of the film, we see Emily run off the scene looking off a view of the wooded hills in San Francisco that can be seen as a “clean” view.
This was a wonderful film and the first I have seen of Olivier Assayas and would love to see more of his work. What grabbed me was the cinematography, then the actors themselves. How they put a lot of effort into their roles was very striking. Not a lot of actors can pull off what they could do and you can tell that Assayas wanted and received the effort from them. If you want to see a great independent film, and you’re new to this genre, I recommend Clean for you.