Drama fails to take the deep plunge into the difficult process of restarting a life.
After the much maligned Demonlover, French filmmaker Oliver Assayas’ newest hardly imposes itself as the sort of film that makes coming off drugs like an eventful process, instead this is a dried up tale that flatlines itself with an inventory of moments – at least with Trainspotting the junkie nightmare and coming off junk was a process pleasantly painful.
She doesn’t look like one, she doesn’t sound like one, and she sure doesn’t act like one. Take your pick, – Maggie Cheung’s (Hero) first English speaking role, Cannes-winning performance is simply non-convincing, she doesn’t pass herself as a junkie, a distraught mother and especially not as a punk rock singer. One sequence shows off her talents as a singer which resonates as fingernails running down a chalkboard would. For his brief appearances, Nick Nolte (The Good Thief) offers a more compassionate and more authentic interpretation as the sensible father-in-law and fuels the film’s only credible performance.
Clean echoes that search for a light at the end of the tunnel, but while it avoids melodrama and attempts to inject a sense of realism with the hand-held camera aesthetics featuring daily mundane baby-step events it also avoids a sense of attachment. Here, the narrative structure seems to haphazardly demonstrate a mother’s yearning for a reunion with her son, which she seems completely oblivious to his existence – so many sequences fail to justify the results of her final actions.
While most films are concerned with the life-defining events and withdrawal symptoms, this project funded by the Canadian production dollars (have fun counting the number of times a Canadian city gets mentioned) is more about all of the moments in the transition, and the moments of void. Lacking a back-story of a history of addiction, Assayas’ process of recovery begins with one argument, one shooting up scene followed by one night in jail. It is hard to figure out the director’s motivation for creating this particular story; it is stripped from the horrors that show the decapitating world of self-infliction and all the strains it causes to the remaining family. Instead, Assayas keeps his main figure mute and concentrates on displacement and getting his character from point A to Z in a world of interactions with secondary characters.
