The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 8-14
Boarding Gate (2007)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
The elements are there in Boarding Gate of a trashy good time: a girl and a gun, smoldering sexuality (clothed and unclothed), conspiracies and double-crosses. Most B-movies, though, don’t have the Contempt-like drawn-out dialogue scenes, soundtrack featuring Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, and inhumanly slick surfaces that this one does. But the best B-movies still manage to say something about human nature in their own rough ways, and writer/director Assayas honors that legacy here, albeit in a more intellectualized form. The former Cahiers du cinéma critic may load his film up with plot twists in the back half, but the most fascinating turns lie in Sandra’s (Asia Argento) own psychological contradictions. The former prostitute doesn’t have any illusions about the soulless world she inhabits, yet still somehow holds onto a sliver of hope for real love in spite of it all. Watching Argento turn on a dime from drugged-out vulnerability to voracious carnality turns out to be its own illuminating spectacle, especially as Assayas implicitly posits that such emotional authenticity may have already been long ground underfoot by a globalized environment in which human beings are mere vessels for capitalistic bottom lines. Kenji Fujishima (March 11, 8:30pm as part of “Olivier Assayas’s International Trilogy” at Metrograph, with Assayas in person for earlier screenings of Clean and demonlover)