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No motive is too murky or elusive for "Boarding Gate," a confusing sexual thriller that casts Asia Argento as a femme fatale who can barely utter a convincing declarative sentence to save her life. With her wan complexion and stringy hair, she looks like a junkie with the poor elocution to match. Except she's not actually high. She's just
confused? Desperate? Tired of a hard-knock life? It's probably a little bit of all of the above, but the film never clarifies why, exactly, she decides to go into cahoots with a current lover to kill off an old lover.Argento plays Sandra, a sultry young thing who used to work for businessman Miles Rennberg ( Michael Madsen) -- he hired her to "entertain" clients. Miles and Sandra had their own kinky affair, the kind where he plied her for sordid details of her escort evenings and she got off on his perverted habits. Was it love? Who knows. Sometimes Sandra says yes, sometimes no. Sometimes she thinks lovingly of him, other times he seems to be one of many men who she's manipulated for personal gain.
If director Olivier Assayas is trying to say that some women find it hard to distinguish love from dangerous obsession, his point is taken in the first nanosecond of Sandra and Miles' boring banter. But beyond that, he muddies Sandra's psychology to the point that she never achieves anything more than the status of a character sketch. By the end of the film -- after she shoots Miles and runs off to be with her new lover, only to end up being chased by gun-wielding Chinese men in Hawaiian shirts -- you lose interest in who she loves or doesn't love, or who loves or doesn't love her. It's a big mess of seduction and manipulation, and all the twists and turns will confuse even the most dogged plot-tracers.
Sandra refuses to be a victim, but she's not a complete enough character to even be that clichéd: The film never finishes her arc from murderess to would-be victim. She's in a mess of her own doing, and she doesn't have the coherence or even badassness to gain any sympathies.
Boarding Gate Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. Starring Asia Argento, Michael Madsen, Carl Ng, Kelly Lin
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