Boarding Gate Movie Review
I’m fairly certain one reason that the French director Olivier Assayas made “Boarding Gate” is that he wanted to watch the Italian actress Asia Argento strut around in black underwear and punishing heels. And why not? Ms. Argento looks delectable if somewhat demented in “Boarding Gate,” in which she comes across as a postmodern Pearl White, who starred in silent adventure serials like “The Perils of Pauline.” Ms. Argento seems to invite trouble, and Mr. Assayas, who has a way of capturing the seemingly ineffable, has a thing for troubled, troubling women.
“Boarding Gate,” a casually beautiful, preposterously plotted, elliptical thriller, earned little love last year when it played at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown out of competition. It didn’t do much for Mr. Assayas’s reputation, at least among some critics, who had been just as eager to dismiss his other recent films, among them “Clean” (2004) and the much-maligned “demonlover” (2002). What “Boarding Gate” did do was reconfirm Ms. Argento as one of contemporary cinema’s most fascinating creatures. Her on-screen ferocity is now generating as much interest as her tattoos — an angel hovers above her pubic bone, and an eye stares out from one shoulder — or the ease with which she sheds her clothes, which explains why I can describe those tattoos with confidence. Source: NYTimes
