csprague
Posts 184
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6/21/2007 3:06 PM
posted awhile ago
Clean
Clean A woman throws herself into a last-ditch struggle to conquer her demons in this gritty drama from director Olivier Assayas. Lee Hauser ( James Johnston) is a faded rock star who lives with his wife, Emily Wang ( Maggie Cheung), the former host of a European music video show, in a small town in Western Canada. Both Lee and Emily have been battling drug addiction for years, and when Lee finally dies of an OD, Emily finds herself charged with possession of heroin and ends up spending six months in jail. Lee and Emily's son, Jay ( James Dennis), has been living with his paternal grandparents, Albrecht ( Nick Nolte) and Rosemary ( Martha Henry), and while Emily is eager to see her son after getting out of jail, Albrecht persuades her that she needs to get herself clean before she can reconnect with Jay. Determined to get off methadone, Emily relocates to France, where she scares up a job as a waitress and moves in with her old friend Elena ( Béatrice Dalle). Emily's attempts to start a new career and stay off drugs prove to be an uphill battle, and she doesn't appear to be winning her fight when she learns that Albrecht and Jay will be accompanying Rosemary to London for medical treatment when Rosemary contracts a serious illness -- and that Albrecht is considering making a side trip to Paris. Clean was screened in competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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FullMetal_Athei st
Posts 9
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6/26/2007 8:51 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: Clean
I only vaguely remember this film from a late night screening at the 2004 Cambridge (UK) Film Festival. As a huge Maggie Cheung fan I recall being somewhat dissapointed. She just didn't convince me that she was a methadone addict and that rather put the spanner in the works for me. Was nice to see Beatrice Dalle again though, the last time I saw her was when a Betty Blue poster adorned my wall back in my student days (I believe it was illegal for students in England NOT to have a Betty Blue poster on their walls back in the mid eighties). Personally, I much prefer Maggie Cheung's earlier collaboration with Assayas, Irma Vep - a really delightful satire on the pretensions of French cinema and its critics.
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HairyLime
Posts 24
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7/4/2007 8:33 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: Clean
I had caught a half an hour of this film about a month ago, and thought it looked like a pretty interesting story, so I had filed it away for future reference, intending to rent it someday to watch the rest. I was tickled to receive it as my first 'spout mavens' screener last weekend. I was initially drawn to this movie by Maggie Cheung, who I had enjoyed in 'In the Mood For Love' and 'Hero' and 'Days of Being Wild', but it is really Nick Nolte, in his small but pivotal role as her dead husband's grieving but levelheaded father who really stuck a chord with me. His gruff no-nonsense but fair minded portrayal felt real and believable in a down-to-earth manner. Nick Nolte has long made a career of turning in 'better than necessary' performances in otherwise forgettable movies (North Dallas Forty, 48 Hrs, The Hulk) with occassional flirts with greatness (Affliction), and it is always nice to see his lined and weathered face and hear his gravelly voice. I was less than impressed with the remainder of the movie, however. The beginning felt awkward and contrived, especially an early scene where a bunch of peripheral characters sum up the 'backstory' for the audience, and while I really wanted to sympathize with Emily, the performance felt a bit cold and detached, and the 'backstage show biz' setting didn't help. Other than a few 'desperately searching for drugs' scenes and a couple swoons, you didn't really feel the desperate struggle she must have gone through in order to kick the habit. The best part of the movie, it turns out, I had already seen, in the final half an hour, where Emily tries to reaquaint herself with her son, and has to explain her past to him, and make a hard decision about getting her life back on track. One thing I was impressed with in this film, is the sober approach to drugs and addiction, from a user's standpoint, rather than the oversimplified reactionary 'just say no' attitude of those in the quote unquote "War on Drugs".
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QFLW
Posts 18
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7/14/2007 1:36 PM
posted awhile ago
Clean
Sometimes it’s the situation in a film that moves me to tears, not necessarily the characters or performances. Such was the case here. Maggie Cheung certainly did well as Emily Wang, a woman whose drug addiction had alienated nearly everyone around her by making her haughty, self-centered, self-delusional and certainly difficult. So much so that when Lee, her significant other, dies from a heroin overdose, nearly everyone she knows falls away from her. When she emerges from her stint in jail for heroin possession, she’s relatively broke, homeless and Lee’s parents have been awarded custody of her son Jay. Lee’s father, Albrecht (played by Nick Nolte), is sympathetic to her situation and willing to give her a chance to change for the better in order to have her son with her again. So then we watch Emily reconciling herself to finding a job and a new life. She ends up taking a job in a department store, which, after her life in the rock music world with Lee, strikes her as boring and “grim.” “It’s the life we all lead,” says a friend. “Is being a drug addict better?” “I don’t know,” says Emily. I suppose we’re meant to applaud Emily for accepting terms in order to get her son back, but she doesn’t excite that kind of response. The peripheral characters were more interesting that Emily herself. Certainly Em’s efforts as a singer/songwriter were uninteresting. The tears came when she broke down in her friend’s house, saying she wished Lee was there to hold her in his arms and tell her things would be all right, and again when she was trying to re-establish her relationship with her son, who’d been told by Grandma Rosemary that Emily had killed his father by giving him drugs. But it wasn’t sympathy for Emily so much as being aware of how I would feel in her place. Nick Nolte didn’t fit into this film well; it was hard to see him as Lee’s father and a grandfather. He seemed far away, as if he were on drugs himself. The open-ended “conclusion” was unsatisfactory, leaving us with Emily in San Francisco where she was recording her spacey, droning songs (bringing Yoko Ono to mind). It makes the film a slice of life rather than a defined story. But perhaps in America we’ve been fed too many movies in which everything comes to a decided conclusion—usually certain triumph. http://www.spout.com/films/245366/default.aspx
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FullMetal_Athei st
Posts 9
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8/10/2007 1:12 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: Clean
Clean review
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moviedodd
Posts 7
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8/14/2007 1:49 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: Clean
Review
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analogzombie
Posts 31
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8/14/2007 9:52 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: Clean
I really enjoyed the film. Maggie Cheung crafts a great character and Assayas creates a very believable world. Check out my review here.
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Demndiary
Posts 14
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8/16/2007 9:10 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: Clean
Demndiary's take on Clean.
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JimBell
Posts 94
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8/20/2007 4:06 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: Clean
In Clean (2004), Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung) must get her act together—kick heroin, find employment, alter attitude—if she is to see her young son. Screenwriter and director Olivier Assayas says on the sleeve for the DVD, “ Society tells us relentlessly to live for today, and offers instant gratification through the consumer goods that it puts at our disposal. Drugs are still the best way of achieving precisely that aim. They give us the peace that we ache for, and give satisfaction, just like medicines, which treat the symptoms and leave the disease untouched.” When I tell people the Clean story, they say, “That sounds good.” But for the story to work, the screen writer/director has to address and overcome one fundamental problem: After we are introduced to Emily as thoroughly despicable, we suddenly have to care about her. The only thing Clean does to get us on side is have Emily played by a superb actress. She can, however, only bring to life what she’s given. We would care more about her fate if she weren’t presented entirely negatively: entirely at odds with her musician husband (who then overdoses), incompetent at everything (e.g., trying to manage her husband’s career), and badmouthed by everyone (yes, everyone) in the music business. We would understand better her strong interest in her son if, early in the movie, we’d seen them together. Instead all we get is someone wondering aloud why you’d have a kid and then never see him. Unfortunately, given this structural problem, Clean presents some of the most uneven acting you’ll see. Maggie Cheung is excellent, trying successfully to hold our interest with a raised eyebrow or a downcast glance. One Spout critic denigrated her performance as being unlike a methadone addict, but I haven’t been a methadone addict and neither has anyone close to me, so I cannot judge the veracity. Regardless, the movie uniquely focuses less on the horrors of withdrawal that the everyday insults of trying to find employment and a career. But her counterpart, the taciturn grandfather keeping her from her son is consistently terrible. It’s as if Nick Nolte, whom I’ve like in many movies, got a take on the reserved old boat builder which was off-base and unconvincing but he clung to it consistently throughout the movie, giving each of his scenes a discomfiting inauthenticity. This is not to say that the scrip for old Albrecht is not wonderful. But let‘s separate the two. The script has a wonderfully level-headed, no-nonsense guy, but Nolte never does it justice, leaving us to do the work of making the great lines work. Fortunately, the little boy (James Dennis) is wonderful. In the scene where he and his mother are at a French zoo, he compares it unfavourably to the zoo in Vancouver, then launches into this kid-like story about beavers being everywhere in Canada. When his mom asks if they’re dangerous, he says, no, they’re stupid. Not only is the unconventional logic typical of many young kids, but James Dennis delivers the lines with such verve and spontaneity that I wonder if they were improvised. As grandparents are want to say, he is a special kid. It is too bad the movie didn’t show him together with his mother early on, for then we might have better understood her motivation and cared whether she changed enough to warrant her son.
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chesterfilms
Posts 24
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8/20/2007 5:51 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: Clean
Come Clean
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