May 20, 2006
clean
Gathering up a burger with fat onion rings at a restaurant counter after getting out of the stir. Swiftly and silently running her hand along the naked body of a barely-known overdose, having not had the chance to touch her boyfriend's dead body when he OD'd earlier. These are two things Maggie Cheung does in Clean, gestures slight but not furtive; neither does the camera linger over them, nor do they intrude on the conversations happening. They are barely events, off to the side of the dialog-driven story, but each of them wrapped up in a sensuality that always concerns not what's sensually there so much as that which has been withheld until that moment. These are tiny gestures of presabsence, awfully moving. But then, we could watch Maggie Cheung knit for two hours, and sometimes this movie (made in 2004, just now released in the US) isn't much more than that. It's enough.
Equally, we could equally watch Nick Nolte stare into space for an hour. Here he conjures up a striking performance, perhaps his best, much of which is just that: staring into space and calculating, figuring things out, waiting for the recoil he uncertainly expects from Cheung after each of his polite, hopeful rhetorical brutalities. They never come.
Cheung's struggle isn't with him; it's with herself. Specifically, it's between her face and her hair. From the first scene, her black bat-coif is an ugly, stylized exaggeration that, against all odds, overdoes her famous face. The hair, in fairly simple manner, is her bad blood, her stupid rock mythology to which she clings, as if to the possibility of winning; it's her junkie self. When, later in the movie, she puts on an orange watch cap, her face changes dramatically: wide, defeated, plain. The defeat is her victory.
The absurdity by which she goes to San Francisco to get clean can't even be processed; here at HQ, that little bit of the Eighties that we can recall involved a constant stream of friends with habits leaving the Bay Area: for home, Hazelden, Hawai'i, "the land." That the sound of Mazzy Star is the sound of getting off dope is equally hard to suppose. But this is all in the last few minutes of the film, some kind of bookend to the opening number, Metric's "Dead Disco," which we are perhaps supposed to dislike (not so; a slight, perfect song). Well — narrative. Well — French person's America.
Mostly it's the faces, the physical gestures, the endless miniature image-defeats, the melancholy of the sensual, the watching.
Posted by jane at May 20, 2006 11:50 PM | TrackBack