Boarding Gate

Finally got a day-off from the March Madness madness and Dave and I took in Boarding Gate during the matinee at Cinema Village (the original plan was to also catch Contempt at Film Forum as a “Girl and a Gun” double feature but we didn’t pull it off).

I thought the greatest strength of Gate was director Olivier Assayas’ use of the camera to deny the audience information. He sets the rules up early and obviously, playing with focus during a two-way conversation with Asia Argento and Michael Madsen’s characters, keeping much of the action and dialogue out of focus. Eat your heart out, Toland.

Having set this rule, Assayas then uses the device in more subtle ways throughout Gate. It doesn’t really serve to develop the plot, which bothered me, but as Dave pointed out, it does mirror the plot and theme.

Like the images on the printed film itself, the audience is never supplied with all the answers in what is essentially a murder mystery. Is this intentional? Is Assayas trying to illustrate that in the modern, capitalist world his characters are forced to tear each other apart to succeed? And is their motivation for these actions so irrelevant that so too are important threads of the plot and identity of key players?

Or is he just a hack?

And in a film where much goes said that should remain unsaid, do we care?

But, Asia Argento is in this, and there are worse reasons to see a movie.

Tags: Asia Argento, Boarding Gate, Cinema Village, Contempt, Gregg Toland, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Madsen, Olivier Assayas