Public Comment

Clean is a film about picking up the pieces and putting them back together, about kicking a drug habit, about winning back the love of one’s child, about forgiveness and compassion, and almost every other road-to-redemption cliché you can think of. And yet somehow it succeeds.  

Other films have portrayed the shattered lives of drug addicts to much greater effect, and many films, as well as countless TV specials, have followed the efforts of down-and-out mothers to regain custody of their children. Clean does not add much to the genre. But what makes it worth the ticket price, quite simply, is the cast. Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte manage to take a tired tale and infuse it with dignity and humanity. 

Cheung plays Emily, a recovering drug addict trying to rebuild her life so that one day she might be able to take care of her young son. Nolte, along with Martha Henry in another excellent performance, play the parents of Emily’s lover, an obscure musician whose overdose leaves their child permanently in the care of his grandparents.  

The film was written and directed by Cheung’s husband Olivier Assayas, who created the role specifically for her. And though Assayas is to be commended for his casting instincts, much of his direction leaves something to be desired.  

There is no individual scene that is particularly compelling, no moment where the film sinks its hooks into you. In fact, the pace is somewhat slow, at times plodding, taking far too much time in getting where we already know it’s going. It’s meant to be a simple film about a woman’s everyday life, and life is not exactly chock-full of dramatic moments, but still the film can be a bit tedious. The appeal of the movie grows steadily, however, as the characters become more sympathetic and more convincing. 

What Clean does well is track the progress and the setbacks Emily experiences as she makes a series of good and bad decisions en route to an uncertain future. The film does not use the same approach as the graphic drug movies of recent memory, like Trainspotting or Requiem For a Dream, with gruesome scenes of drug ingestion and physical decay; drug use is not really the subject matter here. Rather, Assayas takes a simpler, more accessible route, showing the step-by-painful-step process a woman must undergo in order to piece her life back together—a process that is not full of momentous catastrophes, but instead consists of small measures of success amid a series of events that gradually chip away at her resolve. Friends shun her; former acquaintances demonstrate a lack of faith in her; opportunities seem to vanish as quickly as they appear. At a time when she is most in need of a helping hand, she finds that she has alienated virtually everyone who could lend one. 

Some of Assayas’ directorial techniques are a bit threadbare. Jump cuts and handheld cameras have their place, but they’re all too common these days. There are a couple of scenes where these devices are very effective—as a panicked Emily searches through a crowd, for instance—but for the most part they’ve become a simple and uninspired method by which indie filmmakers declare their indieness. In this case, the strategy often backfires, with the constantly moving camera and disjointed editing only distracting us from the compelling performances of Nolte and Cheung. 

The soundtrack too relies heavily on current trends, using much of the same sort of moody electronica that was featured in—thought not pioneered by—such recent semi-indie films as Lost in Translation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 

However, the simplicity and humanity of the movie manages to overcome the obstacles created by these somewhat trite aesthetic flourishes. It is an optimistic film, and one that bears a hopeful and unfortunately necessary message: that given a chance and a bit of compassion, people can change, and that a small act of kindness can go a long way in alleviating the pain of making one’s way through an indifferent world. 

CLEAN 

Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. 

Starring Maggie Cheung, Nick Nolte, Béatrice Dalle, Jeanne Balibar, Don McKellar,  

Martha Henry, James Johnston, James Dennis, Rémi Martin, Laetitia Spigarelli. 

Playing at Shattuck Cinemas.