Our Music: Clean

By Kent Jones

In Cannes, the word was that Clean, Olivier Assayas’ tenth feature, was a letdown. This “wan,” “tepid,” “underwhelming,” “surprisingly sentimental” movie with a “one-note” performance by Maggie Cheung was going to please only “Assayas loyalists in the press corps.”

And believe me, we know who we are. Because whenever Assayas makes a new film, we are constantly greeted with the words, spoken in tones ranging from the oddly sympathetic to the mildly contemptuous, “Of course I knew that you’d like it.” As if we’d all taken a solemn vow: “Every time Olivier makes a movie, we have to say we like it and try to convince everyone else to like it, too.” The truth is far simpler, of course. For some of us, his movies click. Which is to say that when we first saw L’Enfant de l’hiver (1989) and Paris s’éveille (1991), we didn’t just think, “Oh, here comes another good filmmaker,” but rather, “Here comes somebody who’s putting something onscreen that no one else has ever put up there before, something that I recognize as a part of my life and that hasn’t been formulated into a subject by anyone else.”

In the beginning, I was convinced that there was something generational going on, that Assayas was speaking to a certain group of people who had been born during a particular period. This impression was only confirmed with the thunderbolt of L’Eau froide (1994). Ten years later, I’m not so sure. First of all, there are a number of people who have spoken directly to the aging rock and roll generation—Linklater, Desplechin, Wong Kar-wai, perhaps Hartley and Egoyan at one time, perhaps Von Trier or Yang or Denis or Tsai. Secondly, he has fans all over the age spectrum. Simply put, Assayas represents, more powerfully than any other filmmaker, an idea of cinema that poses a threat to those who embrace the once new and now old idea of cinema we’ve all grown used to. This is, of course, the idea that begins with Renoir (and which was subsequently backdated to the Lumières), blossoms with neorealism and the writings of Bazin, and explodes like a fireworks display with the nouvelle vague. The idea has been perpetuated through the writings and the memory of Serge Daney, and, above all, through the monumental presence, not to mention the collected works, of Jean-Luc Godard.

Those who see Godard’s documentary and ontology-based idea of cinema as the last aesthetic stop can find comfort in the work of Kiarostami, Tsai, Wong, Apichatpong, Hou, Omirbaev, not to mention Garrel, Akerman, the Straubs or Gianikian/Ricci Lucchi (known on the festival circuit as “the nice Straubs”). On a good day, when they’re in the mood, they’re able to see merit in Denis or Desplechin. But they can find no merit in Assayas. And he is a wrench in the machinery. They’re able to dismiss Téchiné as a throwback to the cinéma de qualité (Godard did exactly that in a recent interview with Les Inrockuptibles), but that’s something they can’t manage so easily with Assayas. As a theoretician, Assayas is formidable—it’s clear that he thinks about cinema and its place in the world as much as Daney ever did and certainly as much as Godard does, and his ideas are not so easily dispensed with. I’ve often heard him described as “clever,” meaning: he’s able to capitalize on fashion and create a reasonable facsimile of cinema for the exclusive consumption of “Prada-wearing hipsters,” as one critic put it. Or, he’s stupid, which presumably means that his intelligence and that of his films is nothing but a sham.

Clever? Neil LeBute is clever. David Fincher is clever. And they’ve gotten rich from their cleverness. But is “clever” really the correct word to describe the man who made Les Destinées sentimentales (2000) or demonlover (2002)? What or who did he mean to take by storm with those films? Exactly what audience was Assayas capitalizing on when he made Fin août, début septembre (1998)? Is it “hip” to make a three-hour movie about the lost worlds of hand-crafted porcelain and family-run cognac dynasties? As for the charge of stupidity, that strikes me as a throw-up-your-hands act of desperation. You may dislike Assayas’ cinema, but calling it stupid is more or less admitting that you can’t deal with it.

Let’s look at this “cinéma de qualité” charge that’s levelled at Téchiné—on certain days, in the right light, Téchiné does indeed look like a neo-classicist, in a way that Assayas never will. But the fact is that both of them make films that are character and narrative-based, which is untrue of any of the above-mentioned filmmakers. Rather than a retrograde act, this is for them an act of reclamation and recovery, stretching back not so much to older French cinema but across the ocean to the American cinema, beloved by Godard and Daney yet divorced from its own character and story-based origins in their particular picture of film history. And it also reaches out to Bergman, who Assayas has identified as the most important influence on post-nouvelle vague French filmmakers.

One of the most beautiful moments in Clean occurs about midway through the film. Maggie Cheung’s Emily Wang has been released from prison in Canada, where she’s served six months for possession after her husband has OD’d. They have a child, a little boy, who has been living with her husband’s parents. Emily is trying to kick methadone in a concerted effort to get her son Jay back. Jay’s grandmother (Martha Henry) has contracted some form of cancer, and she is in a hospital in London, while he is staying with his grandfather Albrecht (Nick Nolte) in a nearby hotel. Assayas cuts to a shot of Jay (James Dennis) sitting on a hotel-room floor, putting on his coat, walking to the elevator and out the door to a newsstand, where he buys a copy of a comic book. The scene is accompanied by Brian Eno’s plaintive and lulling “Taking Tiger Mountain.” And that’s all there is to it.

To understand the impact this little scene holds, one needs to understand that it is happened upon, as often happens with Assayas—we have no idea how much or how little time has transpired since the preceding scene, and there is no explanatory linkage to “set up” Jay’s sense of solitude. Which means that we are watching a narrative proceed, but that we are also watching an instant grabbed from the life of a lonely, confused little boy, whose father is dead, whose grandmother is dying, whose grandfather is attentive but a little bewildered about what to do or how to be with a child, and whose mother is a beautiful enigma, a blur, threatening to re-enter his semi-stable life. There is a great beauty to the way Assayas lets us catch up with his narratives—as an artist, he’s always been so attentive to the speed of life, the way reflection and ongoing reality don’t ever really jibe. Do we know that Jay likes comic books? Do we even know very much about who he is? Not up to this point. This game of catch-up has always been a strong point, letting the viewer put the pieces together and track the narrative at the same time, leaving us fairly breathless. It allows Assayas to tell his stories obliquely, get a purchase on the breathlessness of life itself, and isolate little pockets of behavior or flurries of action as a series of grace notes. The spectacular party scene in Irma Vep (1996), for instance, is choreographed to be sure, but loosely, allowing the mess of reality to survive intact. So since we are aware that a story is being told, we isolate these moments ourselves, looking for story points and tracing the ongoing struggle for clarity and definition that all of us maintain every day of our lives, and that few artists ever get a purchase on.

With Clean, Assayas has distilled this practice down to its essence. So that a shot of a little boy simply putting on his coat and going out to buy a comic book, caught in medium shot and virtually unacted, making a small event out of a real little boy’s awkwardness and feigned maturity (it’s in his walk), can be as moving as a carefully choreographed, heavily pointed confrontation. And these are the only kinds of moments there are in Clean. In this story of drug addiction and spiritual rehabilitation, we get only one glimpse of shooting up, cut with elliptical force and offhand pictorial beauty: Maggie Cheung pulls over her car, rubber tubing is pulled around her arm, her eyes glint as her head slips back into the darkness, and we’re faced with the blasted industrial landscape of Hamilton, Ontario, at night and then into morning. When her husband’s parents are told that their son is dead, we get only brief glimpses of their stunned reactions: his sunken heaviness, her bewildered walk in circles through their front yard. We don’t see her son die. We don’t see his burial. We don’t see Emily sweating out her six months in jail. Nor do we see her toughing her way out of her methadone habit. Nor do we ever find out what kind of cancer the grandmother has. Every major plot point happens offscreen, with the exception of Emily’s reunion with Jay. But even the scenes where the characters speak through their difficulties—where Albrecht tells his wife that he’s always been befuddled by children, where he tells Emily that she has to take responsibility for Jay since he and his wife won’t be around forever, where Emily explains to Jay why she and his father took drugs—are unlike the moments of crystal-clarity and perfect communication that we’re used to in movies, and that have been at the heart of cinematic dramaturgy since its beginnings.

Clean is not yet another movie about people who overcome adversity and learn to communicate with each other. It is rather a movie about people who have to communicate with each other, given the urgency of their situation, but for whom said communication provides no greater definition or clarity than it does in life. In other words, Clean contains all the same exchanges and conversations as many other movies we’ve all seen, with the crucial difference that they don’t mean the same thing. And given the fact that the film lacks all the standard turning points and dramatic punches we all know, it’s easy to see why so many people take it for a wan, sentimental, uninvolving film. I would say that Clean is a movie about a woman who begins the action in a state of severe disequilibrium and finds herself, partly by chance, partly by her own initiative and partly through the efforts of others, in an opposite state: balance, clarity, relative peace. The fact that it is not solely her triumph makes it no less moving, and it certainly makes it far more honest than almost every other movie you’re likely to see about spiritual regeneration.

Some have said that one needs to know more than a little about the peculiarities of the rock world to appreciate Clean. I’m not so sure. Assayas has always immersed us within a particular world without going to great lengths to explain its rules. He counts on us to do the mental work and put the pieces together as we watch his characters’ exchanges, based on a prior knowledge of the rules and customs of the particular moral codes of teenagers in the 70s or within the world of Parisian filmmaking ca. 1995 (the sole exception is Les Destinées sentimentales, which is his one adaptation). We all know that people who make music want to get recording contracts and sell records. We all know that certain cult artists are worth more dead than they are alive (Assayas already visited this particular theme with great force at the end of Fin août, début septembre). And we all know that famous people, people like Tricky, who makes a brief appearance as himself here, refusing an audience with Emily, operate on their own schedules and according to their own private logic.

So what’s the problem? I would say that if one knows the music of Brian Eno, and the particular place he’s occupied within the world of rock for almost 40 years (everyone’s favourite behind-the-scenes demiurge), then the abundance of his music in Clean and its integral presence within the action carries a special resonance. Eno is deep inside the world of recorded sound, and yet out on the “fringe” of rock, on the meeting ground with the avant-garde. Which is perfect for a film about a recovering drug addict. Yet if you have no prior knowledge of Eno’s music or his persona, the use of his music here still carries a very special force. Where his soundscapes have traditionally been utilized as a shortcut to mystery in the work of countless film students and more than a few professionals (they literally open up the world beyond the frame), here they provide the characters with a protective aura, a redemptive warmth. And when Emily’s walk through the Chinese restaurant kitchen is accompanied by Eno’s “Spider and I,” followed by Jay’s walk accompanied by “Taking Tiger Mountain,” Assayas is establishing a subtle linkage between mother and son, both in need of protection, before they’ve been reunited.

Wan? Sentimental? Pallid? On the contrary, this is a movie of moments observed, caught, glimpsed within the flow of life. Maggie Cheung’s blank, depleted look at Don McKellar as he says goodbye to her forever as she sits in custody. Nick Nolte’s absolutely precise delineation of unease behind the greatest grace and kindness. Our first glimpse of Jay, sneaking out of his room to get a glimpse of his grandparents discussing the death of his father. The smile that lights up Emily’s face when her son reminds her that he was born in San Francisco. And that walk through the kitchen. Assayas has always been wonderful at filming characters in motion—Maggie and the assistant hurrying up the stairs in Irma Vep, Francis Cluzet and Jeanne Balibar walking by the river in Fin août, début septembre, Ounie Lecomte walking placidly through another Chinese restaurant at the end of Paris s’éveille, still his most underrated film, and the boy’s walk into the woods with his bicycle, phonetically reciting an Allen Ginsberg poem and smoking a Gauloise, in L’Eau froide. Breathlessness. Catching up with life, with thought, with clarity.

Back to Godard and company. It is moments like these in Assayas’ character-based cinema that are the “new” cinema that so troubles JLG, the Straubs, et al., more than CGI or Spielberg or Paul Thomas Anderson. Because it represents a viable alternative as opposed to a retrograde action. And because in 50 years, people will be admiring the end of Clean, which gives us the pristine skies over San Francisco in opposition to the filthy skies over Hamilton at the beginning of the film, alongside the end of Notre musique, the other great film to come out of Cannes this year. And I’m sure they realize that Assayas’ move away from his heroine and up to the clean blue sky is more than faintly reminiscent of the end of Sansho the Bailiff (1954). I can hear the laughter at that comparison now, as I’m typing. But I’m confident that history will bear me out. Why? Because when all is said and done, brilliant as he may be, Olivier Assayas is not nearly as “clever” as his “opponents” think he is. He’s just another great director, interested, as they all are, in redemption.