"Clean"

Maggie Cheung gives an astonishingly complex performance as a junkie rock star trying to clean up her act.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Maggie Cheung as Emily

April 28, 2006 | Olivier Assayas seems to love motor scooters, and I suspect it's not just because he's French. In his 1996 "Irma Vep," a love letter to movies' ability to make us their willing emotional captives, his star, Maggie Cheung, and the charming French actress Nathalie Richard zip through the streets of Paris on a motorbike, the nighttime lights around them blurring into a spiral galaxy of color and energy.

In Assayas' latest picture, "Clean," Cheung plays Emily, a failed rock singer and junkie who has cleaned up her act in order to reconnect with her young son. We see Emily and the boy on a scooter, whizzing through Parisian streets, the kid's borrowed helmet comically large for his little body. A motorbike is a very small vehicle, able to carry two people at most -- but then, sometimes two is just the right number. The lilting movement of that bike, as it skims and swerves along, is a visual suggestion of what it might be like to drift through time and space. For Assayas, the scooter is the universal symbol for weightlessness and intimacy, as well as for the sometimes daunting act of simply getting from point A to B.

That sequence appears late in "Clean," and it's the first real assurance we have that Emily is safely on her way to B. "Clean" is a delicate picture about the difficulty of change, although putting it that way makes it sound like just another conventional story about redemption, which it decidedly is not. "Clean" isn't actually about the act of getting clean; Assayas isn't interested in the usual junkie montages, sequences in which addicts sweat out their problems and then either hippety-hop off into a drug-free new life or backslide into the old one. Kicking heroin, essential as it is for Emily to do so, is really the least of her problems, just the first layer of tangled brush she needs to clear away in order to find out what really matters to her. Assayas and Cheung are more interested in getting to the very human core of an essentially unlikable person: As Cheung plays her, Emily is maddeningly self-centered -- it's easy to see why no one can stand her -- and yet we can't help reaching out to her, believing that beneath this impossible person is someone that we might actually be able to like.

The plot of "Clean" is relatively straightforward -- a young mother tries to find a way to get her son back into her life -- but Cheung's astonishing performance has so many layers of complexity that it feels bottomless. As the movie opens, Cheung's Emily and her partner, Lee (James Johnston), a fading 40-ish rock star, are just arriving at an Ontario motel. Emily scores some dope for herself and for Lee, but the two quarrel, and she leaves the room to get high by herself; when she returns in the morning, he has died from an overdose.

Emily, at first implicated in his death, ends up serving six months for possession. But once she's released, she has no idea what to do with her life: She and Lee have a young son, Jay (he's played by a marvelous child actor, James Dennis), who appears to have been something of a footnote in their lives, rather than the focus of it. He's been parked with Lee's parents, Rosemary (Martha Henry) and Albrecht (Nick Nolte), at their home in Vancouver. They love the boy, but Albrecht worries that it will become more difficult for them to care for him as they age, a concern that becomes even more immediate when Rosemary becomes seriously ill.

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