Boarding Gate (2007)

Very well executed

Let's be realistic.

A Disappointing Continuation

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

This is not quite as muddled as made out to be, but it's not any kind of Hong Kong pistol stuff that it may appear to be based on plot and cast either. It's the kind of film that presents itself as a thriller but is actually about people and the structure.It's a two-part complex. The first part plays like an emotional upskirt peek at the tormented soul of this woman, who loved at the hands of a man who tossed and toyed her around for pleasure. She's played by Asia Argento who so effortlessly can channel sex mixed with pain - one of her early film roles after all was back in Italy for father Dario, where she falls victim to a serial rapist. We get some stuff about drugs, pistols are whipped out then forgotten again.Now the French touch, our first pointer about what it's all really about; she becomes the character she has written about, a fictional sci-fi woman who controls men. Tables are switched, and turns out she was really manipulating this whole time from inside the image he had been used to subdue. For the second part we fly down to Hong Kong where it threatens again to become a thriller. Pistols are whipped out again and forgotten once more. Here we come to understand that she's fallen prey to another lover controlling her for own purposes. There's another woman who is also vying for control of her strings, a sexual antagonist.So having consummated one desire about revenge, she is not one step closer to being a free person. Her present suffering is still bound to that first violence that was a sexual desire; this is given to us as having been raped in her sleep, and so the horrible hurt of an unconscious drive, repressed, felt to be beyond any control and so any responsibility. Aptly enough, this second part is about self-discovery then; she's vulnerable for the first time, no more games or roles, conceding to flow where it may.It is film noir as far as world dynamics go, make no mistake. To pursue desire is to be trapped helpless in a self-generating chimera.Usually in noir that desire was codified as the femme fatale and who is here our protagonist but rendered as an image, a fictional guise, full of cracks suggesting the distraught person behind.Finally she follows this second manipulative lover so that it can be revealed to us who was pulling the strings from behind all this time. She gets a second chance for revenge. The final image is one of poignant beauty, as blurry, out-of-focus for the world of plotting and machinations that we felt as the film, she ascends out of view liberated. She is literally no longer part of the film that was pure deceit from the start.So for all intents and purposes, it should have been a great film about karmic cycles. It's not quite, but only because, for some reason, this was felt that should also appeal to a broad audience. So, it's filmed in a syncopated manner that is associated with TV, which makes sense in context because the camera is meant to be a frantic eye searching for things as she is, but which probably threw a curveball at those who usually expect a character study in long painterly sweeps and would be otherwise rewarded here.It didn't help that it came out in the same year as No Country, another post-noir, much more overtly cinematic, and a host of other well-received films. So not a groundbreaking film, but see it if it shows up.

This is one of the great "Who gives a bleep!" movies of all time. Most of the film isn't really that bad, but it never gives you a reason to care what happens to any of characters or wonder how the story will turn out.Sandra (Asia Argento) used to be a prostitute in love with rich and screwed up investment banker Miles (Michael Madsen). They used to have depraved sex and Miles also used Sandra to have sex with other businessmen to get inside information from them. That so-called relationship ended and now Sandra works for Lester and Sue Wang (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin), helping manage their import/export business. Sandra also works for herself, smuggling drugs inside the Wang's shipments and selling those drugs with the help of her apparent friend Lisa (Joanne Preiss). After one of Sandra's drug deals goes bad, Lester inexplicably shows up to help her out, somebody ends up dead and Sandra flees to Singapore, where someone else ends up dead and people try to kill her until a blonde (Kim Gordon) playing the part of Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction shows up to solve all of Sandra's immediate problems.This is an excruciatingly boring movie. If you're not fidgeting in your seat, wishing for it to be over before it's even halfway done, you'd have to be either stoned out of your mind or dead. But Boarding Gate isn't boring because the acting is flat or the plot is lame or anything like that. Most of the dialog is fairly ridiculous and there's a silly twist in the middle, but a lot of Oliver Assayas' work is fairly decent. The story is okay and the movie looks fine. None of the actors embarrass themselves, or anything like that. However, nothing that happens in this movie to any of the characters matters at all, because you don't care if they succeed or fail, live or die.Sandra is the star of this story. She's the one we're supposed to identify with, the one we worry about when she's threatened or in danger. The movie, though, only defines her as a drug-dealing, former prostitute. We're given nothing else about Sandra and how she came to be this person. The film doesn't even seem to care if Sandra is good or bad. She's just the star and the audience is expected to care about her. I t's as though Assayas looked at Argento and was so blinded by what he saw, he thinks everyone else will be just as blind. I can see fine, though, and Argento's nothing special.That applies to the other characters in the film as well. Carl Ng and Kelly Lin try hard to pump some genuine emotion into Lester and Sue, but it's so unconnected to anything in the story that it just makes Lester and Sue seem weird and overexcited. Miles is, essentially, Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen. If you like Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll enjoy his time on screen. If you want anything more than Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll be greatly disappointed.There are three points where the movie tries to make us care about these people. Sandra and Miles have two unbelievably long and pointless scenes where they spout unmemorable and obviously contrived dialog at each other and Sandra and Sue have their own scene that's not quite as long but just as useless. I think the conversations are supposed to give us insight into these people but they really just dwell on a lot of the backstory to this movie and run over some exposition. These scenes tell us nothing about Sandra, Miles or Sue that isn't readily apparent from the moment we encounter them.Argento goes topless at one point and rubs her crotch at another. Those moments make you think Boarding Gate is going to be one of those exploitive, sex-and-guns, late-night-cable thrillers. That's all the sex in the movie, though, and there's not much more violence. It's like Assayas thought he could take the script for a crude and prurient melodrama and "class it up" enough to make it a serious drama. He couldn't, which leaves this movie in a weird limbo. If you could relate to these characters as real people, you might be interested in what happens to them. But since you can't relate to them, all you can focus on is how the story manages to be both pretentious and uneventful.

In Paris, the businessman Miles Rennberg (Michael Madsen) is ruined after bad investments and tells his partner Andrew (Alex Descas) that he will sell his share to the company Golden Eagle. When Miles meets the former prostitute Sandra (Asia Argento), she recalls her love for him and their kinky sex. Miles used her services to entertain and get inside information from other entrepreneurs and used to feel excited with their dirty sex. Sandra is presently working with Sue (Kelly Lin) and her husband Lester Wong (Carl Ng) and dreams on having her night-club in Beijing; further, she is the lover of Lester. One night, Sandra visits Miles in his apartment and she handcuffs him in the preliminaries of their sex game; nevertheless, she unexpectedly shots him in the nape. Then she meets Lester, who had a contract to kill Miles, and he gives the tickets and directions to Sandra to travel to Hong Kong and meet his friend Mr. Ho (Boss Mok). Lester would meet her later and get their money. When Sandra discovers that she had been betrayed and Lester would not arrive in Hong Kong, she needs to fight to survive in a hostile environment. "Boarding Gate" is a film with a good story of betrayal but unfortunately with a terrible screenplay. The plot is a complete mess but Asia Argento saves the film, at least for fans of this actress like me. She is sexy performing her perverted but confused character that is capable of having kinky sex with strangers and fall in love for two scumbags. It is difficult to understand her contradictory character that was a prostitute but refuses the money she earned for killing Miles. The film also makes a confused tour and in the beginning is very difficult to understand that the story takes place in Paris. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Traição em Hong Kong" ("Betrayal in Hong Kong")

This is a good movie to watch if you like dark action dramas. The plot is twisted and shows the darker side of life and the black market. There are some hot sex related scenes, and pretty good acting throughout. The colors and effects used in production are characteristic of other contemporary works in this genre. I particularly like how the film shows a "real life" scenario where the ones involved in dirty deeds are powerful and vulnerable all at the same time. It also shows the women as being cunning and treacherous, rather than just pawns who stand behind the men. Mad props to the director/producer for going out on a limb and taking this approach. It adds another level of sexual something and uniqueness.Not a movie for those who like happy endings that give you all the answers. If you like movies like The Usual Suspects, Trainspotting, or Requiem for a Dream, ...you should check this film out.