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Clean

Screening: Monday 25 June, 6:30pm

Clean (Oliver Assayas, France/Canada/UK 2003)

Hamilton, Ontario. Washed-up rock star Lee Hauser and his partner, Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung), two junkies, are barely subsisting in trashy hotel rooms and dingy nightclubs. When Lee overdoses, a career and two lives are over. After a brief stint in jail, Emily is given her walking papers by Lee's manager (Don McKellar), and is told by Lee's father, Vancouver boatbuilder Albrecht (Nick Nolte), to stay away from her young son, Jay.

Six months later and broke, she's moved to Paris and is attempting to rebuild her life, kick drugs and get Jay back. But gnawing at her newfound sense of responsibility is a possible recording career, and once a friend invites her to San Francisco to record a demo, Emily is caught between the pull of rock-star glamour and the pressing gravity of everyday existence.

The interactions between the characters in Clean seem familiar, and even at times sentimental, but Olivier Assayas' nimble direction — and the performances, especially Cheung (who won Best Actress honours at the 2004 Cannes festival) and the catastrophically avuncular Nolte — highlights the awkwardness, the search for common ground and, above all, the redemption, that other melodramas often take for granted, or attempt to achieve with sensational plot twists.

After the full-tilt Demonlover, Assayas immerses himself in a story that's, well, cleaner, concentrating on the basic emotions that relate the characters to each other. Brilliantly shot on location in Ontario and Paris by Eric Gautier, Clean dares to pause on characters' faces, their manners, their ways of being. As in all of his films, Assayas sides with humanity.

Written by Assayas. Photographed by Eric Gautier. With Maggie Cheung, nick Nolte, Béatrice Dalle, Jeanne Balibar, Don McKellar.

(35mm, Colour, 110 mins, In French English and Cantonese, with English subtitles)

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