Olivier Assayas - Super Genius: BOARDING GATE, DEMONLOVER

Thank god that at least there are a few Frenchmen, like Olivier Assayas, who get that life is beautiful even when (or especially when) it's drenched in blood. Assayas makes movies that move and feel like ambient techno music: glacial emotions and settings, rapid tempo stream of conscious flow editing and magnificent paranoid foley work cohere and swirl. As characters walk around crowded hallways there's a constant flow of parties, cash registers, and other sounds from every hole in the wall they pass, the kind of thing Orson Welles fought to keep in TOUCH OF EVIL but lost, the real noises of this crazy world. In attempting a futurist neo-realism, he shows us just how bizarre our lives have become. He makes it seem ironic that science fiction movies are built on sets when the real world is right now far more complex and cyber-delic than anything one singular human mind could e'er imagine. Assayas provides a link wherein even corporate work and air travel becomes sexual and dangerous, futuristic. He knows where to point the camera to make the familiar resonate into the uncanny, the everyday into the post-modern and sinister.

His latest, BOARDING GATE (2007), returns to the world of corporate espionage in catsuits that won him mixed reviews with DEMONLOVER (2002). Superstar Asia Argento is great here playing a cross between her strung-out exhibitionist more-or-less self in SCARLET DIVA and the role which helped make her an international sex symbol, the influential-but-little-seen cult film NEW ROSE HOTEL (1998).

Based on a short story by William Gibson and directed by Abel Ferrara, HOTEL was set in a dystopian future where international corporations had replaced government and everything from banking to boarding room negotiations were done via camera phones. It starred Christopher Walken and Willem DaFoe as two corporate spies-for-hire who recruit Asia's duplicitous and irresistible prostitute to seduce and betray a married Japanese researcher. They find Argento at a hip bar where the DJ is playing Cat Power in all murky cool Bozan Bajeli reds. Assayas clearly loves NEW ROSE HOTEL or parts of it. The son of Jacques Remy, Assayas has captures the child's eye view of jet set privilege, being shuffled through futuristic airport terminals and off to weird meetings and culture shock shopping malls without hardly knowing why or how soon you will get to rest and have a coke. Parents, nannies, porters, and a hostile but fascinating swirl of international commerce going on all around his eggshell mind.

Critics say that for all his innovations, but that's hardly relevant; if he riffs on other's work, it's cool because he steals only from the very best. Using the template of Godard's ALPHAVILLE (modern business architecture and practices as science fiction) and the sexy late night with unlimited mini-bar expense account decadence of Ferrara's HOTEL, he joins them together at the USB port where Argento's own SCARLET DIVA wanders in exile.

One thing Assayas does better than all the rest, Godard included, is transmitting the sense of emotionless futurism that comes from being drugged out on international flights: following the protracted hook-up and assassination of Michael Madsen comes a bravura montage of Asia (Argento) on an overnight flight to Hong Kong (the city), the television on the back of the seat hawking the tourist spots seem strange and alien in ways only Assayas can deliver. He also sjhows the weird intimacy that develops between passengers sleeping next to each other in a darkened cabin for hours and hours; Asia climbing over sleeping Chinese people to get back to her seat; waking up cuddled against the old man next to her and not feeling good or bad about it, how in this one situation, there's still such a thing as a communal slumber party of all ages and nationalities, Grabbing a bottle of water off the stewardess's tray at what seems like the dead of night, but then opening the window shade and the harsh white rays of the rising sun blast in like a laser.

If you have seen DEMONLOVER you remember the opening with the water on the plane and this leads to a sense of overall paranoia which Assayas clearly loves playing with, exploiting for our mutual benefit. Most of all he has an eye for Asia Argento, perhaps the perfect queen of the Assayas universe (which she helped birth, after all, via HOTEL). Maggie Cheung and Connie Nielsen could only do so much with their catsuits and slinky stares; Asia is this sort of person, this cat woman espionage agent: like Assayas she has a famous filmmaker dad (Dario) and a penchant for "stealing" shots at airports for maximum free sci fi affect. And just like her character in GATE, Argento lives the life of a jet setting debauched intellectual artist forever maneuvering her way through the tangled web of vice and male desire for her own exhibitionist fun and profit! It's who she is... in real life...

If such a thing still existed.

She Spies, I Get Sad

There are a million ways to perceive the world, a million shades

The saddest thing about the sexy spy comedy starring Natasha Henstridge, SHE SPIES, this canceled old network late night TV show now available on DVD, is that it’s so self aware that it becomes lost in itself and still is what it is. For me as its target audience it's devastating to see how refined banality can be. There’s nothing “wrong” with the show per se, but it just leaves itself nowhere to go in its post-modern archness. It also splits viewers between those in and those not in show business. If you are in show business, advertising, television or have ever freelanced in these areas, then you know the bizarre depressing nature of watching TV shows while at work, the steady digital editing and toying, images repeating over and over, facile banter straining for wittiness amongst your trend-hogging colleagues. In this show it seems as if the editors are editing as it goes along, live, and bored.

What saves it is Natasha Henstridge, who has a genuine gift for comedy. She plays it in this loose, fun way like she's a big Groucho Marx fan. She transcends the need for perfect comic timing by sheer not caring. As the star of this show and aware obviously of its zero budget. Actually, the show makes fun of its zero budget in its post-ironic way, but the third time you see a show become hip to its disposability, even that becomes disposable. Then you are in trouble, because fourth wall winks aint been new, modern or relevant since the Weimar era. If the spies were to perform some Brecht, then as Chico Marx would say, you a gotta something.

We all think there is a common reality in which there is no god or there is a god or black people suck or black people are groovy or there is no difference but in fact our own minds can be changed and opened incredibly… if we all followed our own path towards bliss, if we all dropped our guards at once and embraced each other in unconditional love then the world would change instantly for the better.

Great feats should be done because one is thrilled to be discovering their inner potential, the way a kid opens presents at Xmas, or someone discovers there’s a whole other floor to their house they never knew about. That would be a good story, the one where they discover the extra floor in the house for real and someone’s living in it, like Anne Frank.

We all have an Anne Frank in our heads, squirreled away,.

But instead we do our great deeds to… what? win an award? get ourselves noticed by the hot chick or dad? Why do want to get the hot chick? What will she bring us? Will she bring us the admiration of our friends? Will they love us more? Will we explode in ecstasy copulating with such excellent alien DNA? What about dad? Will he ever really think we're adults as long as we keep expecting him to tell us so? Is it for this admiration, or is it that we like the chemicals the brain sends us when we get noticed. Our excellence is its own reward, the system works, admiration begets confidence which begets stronger workers.

I mention this in regards to SHE SPIES for a very simple reason. The show is afraid of excellence, afraid of pushing for relevance and in doing so it collapses under its own irony and disaffection. The only way to succeed in a show like this is to play it absolutely straight... like BATMAN with Adam West, or STAR TREK with William Shatner. Camp can't be made, folks. Camp has to be earned... through earnestness not self-awareness. Sort of like how the French are funny... except when they do comedy.