FILM COMMENT SELECTS: Boarding Gate and Searchers 2.0 Reviews

Who says I'm not prompt in my posts? You do, of course and that's why you're wrong. In any case, true to my word, here are my miniature, pellet-sized revews of Olivier Assayas' Boarding Gate and Alex Cox's Searchers 2.0. Film Comment Selects will be held at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theater (70 Lincoln Center Plaza). You can find a full overview on this year's FCS, here.

Boarding Gate (2007) Dir: Olivier Assayas

If his last two features films are any indication, it would seem like it’s impossible to truly concentrate on the plots of Olivier Assayas’ films. Both Clean and Boarding Gate follow women looking to leave behind their self-loathing pasts, making the characters’ emotions our guide in an out-of-focus world of metal and glass. This translates best in Boarding Gate when ex-lovers verbally spar instead of waxing nostalgic about drugs and (literal) corporate rape. They may be traipsing about a loveless urban landscape today but yesterday wasn’t much better. The only escape for Sandra (Asia Argento) is when she’s staring off into space. She zones out in in-between places like parking lots and airplane windows to get a little time away from her hopeless present, bouncing between ex-lovers that are either using her or have in the past.

The story begins as Sandra tries to get back into Miles’ (Michael Madsen) good graces, returning after years of absence to trade whispered insults with the now washed-up white-collar mogul. While Sandra takes a jab at Mile by calling him, “the perfect cliché of a bygone era,” there’s no denying the desperation that her cool, catty façade belies. Both of them are well past their prime but refuse to admit it, making Sandra’s good looks the key difference between looking washed up and being it. The chemistry between Madsen and Argento is likewise palpable but could easily be sustained if Argento were spitting venom at a dust mop. While Madsen does fine, Argento’s performance oozes the kind of skuzzy charm that confirms the eminent B-movie diva as having moved up in the world. Her Sandra is a refreshing reminder of her talent after she sleepwalked through her father’s Mother of Tears and a great reassurance that Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress wasn’t just a fluke.

While getting comfortable with Argento is one thing, cozying up to Sandra is another entirely. Whether she’s coaxing Miles into growling, “Slave” over and over again or glowering defiantly, “I desire you, but I don’t love you anymore,” there’s not much to really care about. The actors clearly establish the characters in Assayas’ films, making moments where they have to exposit their ways out of situations excruciating in comparison to scenes where dialogue is untranslated code. It’s a blessing when the audience is left out of the loop during subtitle-less conversations in French or Mandarin. When the past is just an extension of the present and information is everything, being oblivious has its advantages. In these moments, Boarding Gate transcends cliché by allowing its solid cast to carry it’s meaning, making the film’s finale a terrific close to a stylish but otherwise unremarkable chase.

Searchers 2.0 (2007) Dir: Alex Cox

Alex Cox’s tribute to stuntmen and extras is almost as unwatchable as Damon Packard’s Reflections of Evil or Lukas Moodysson’s Container, neatly filling out an unholy trinity of movies at this year’s FCS I wouldn’t recommend to anyone except the most diehard of their fans. Cox’s film is easily the most disappointing because it’s the least jarring and the one whose premise had a semblance of plot to latch onto. Searchers 2.0 is the story of Mel (Del Zamora) and Fred (Ed Pansullo), two out-of-work bit part players as they trek to Monument Valley to get revenge on a screenwriter that wronged them. Just looking at the cast should make it clear that Searchers is a self-indulgent pet project as both Zamora and Pansullo worked with Cox on Repo Man. Unlike Repo Man, Cox’s script has zero competence at comic pacing, grating fingers-on-chalkboard level social commentary and two D-grade actors hamming it up for a director that did them a solid decades ago.

Not only is Searchers obnoxious, slapdash and predictable, it wears its flaws on its sleeve like a badge of courage, declaring itself to be a B-movie for true blue B-movie fans. Even if Pansullo and Zamora were able to eke out a few good readings of Cox’s cheese-soaked disaster of a script, there’d still be the matter of its contents to contend with. As Fred and Mel rattle off references to De Palma, Leone, Ford and every other movie they can think of, Fred’s daughter Delilah (Jaclyn Jonet) has her nose stuck in an Ayn Rand book and drives them around in her “gas-guzzling SUV.” There’s nothing much to it than that. Cox clearly relishes revisiting a road Cox he could never quite get the hang of in the first place, strugglign to establish camaraderie between Fred and Mel while making clunky jabs at American consumers' dependence on cell phones, oil and big label products.

Even in Repo Man, Cox’s attempts at encapsulating “what’s going on” was laughably infantile but that was its appeal. The beats between the characters’ absurd ruminations on life allow us to laugh along with Cox as he pokes fun of them. In Searchers, he forces us to hang out while the unwieldy trio tell tired jokes disguised as character-defining dialogue. Cox’s revanchist philosophy is hard at work throughout the film, making Fred the smug white jerk to Mel's laid-back, under-privileged Mexican and while it might’ve made sense at some point, by now the joke's have grown moldy. Even the main gag behind the showdown with evil screenwriter Fritz Frobisher (Sy Richardson) dies before it gets spat out—how funny is it that these guys are dueling over movie trivia? Honestly, not very. Kinda cute but only for a minute or less.

Look for my final batch of reviewlets this week when I tackle Flash Point, J'entends Plus la Guitare and A Wonderful World.