Clean Reviews

Hong Kong superstar Maggie Cheung gives a revelatory performance as an aspiring singer attempting to get her life back on track in Olivier Assayas' delicately rendered drama about addiction and recovery. Intensely disliked by the friends and fans of Lee Hauser (Gallon Drunk's James Johnston), an '80s rocker whose fame has faded in inverse proportion to his heroin use, former European veejay and demicelebrity Emily Wang (Cheung) has long been considered Lee's Yoko: an unbearable shrew whose interference wrecked a once-glorious career. After Lee suffers a fatal overdose in a British Columbia motel, Emily becomes his Courtney Love, the junkie albatross whom many unfairly blame for his death, including Lee's mother (Martha Henry) and manager (Don McKellar). Lee's father, Albrecht (Nick Nolte), however, believes in forgiveness and his son's free will; he even offers to help Emily get back on her feet after she finishes serving a six-month sentence for possession and emerges from prison virtually broke. But Albrecht will not relinquish custody of Lee and Emily's 5-year-old son, Jay (James Dennis), whom Albrecht and Rosemary have been raising. Though heartbroken, Emily realizes she can't possibly care for a child until she gets her act together. So she heads for Paris with the rough demos of songs she and a fellow inmate wrote and recorded in prison. Taking a job as a waitress in her uncle's Chinese restaurant, Emily passes the disc to an old recording-industry friend, Elena (Beatrice Dalle), who offers Emily a place to stay and tries to get her a meeting with Irene Paolini (Jeanne Balibar), a former lover who's now an industry bigwig. Emily also tries to track down British trip-hop superstar Tricky, an old friend of Lee's who's become a surprising source of emotional support for Albrecht, in hopes that Trick can convince Albrecht to hand custody of Jay over to Emily. Little comes of any of it, and staying clean proves equally difficult: Emily is now addicted to methadone. Nolte gives a beautifully toned performance here, but it's Cheung's show all the way. While always a lovely and engaging performer in such films as Wong Kar-Wai's acclaimed IN THE MOOD FOR THE LOVE and Assayas' own IRMA VEP, little of her past work comes close to what she accomplishes here in terms of subtlety and emotional range. Teaming up with Mazzy Star's Dave Roback (who appears in the film as himself), Cheung also proves an interesting singer, warbling Roback's trippy tunes in a woozy, world-weary croak that's perfectly in keeping with her character and the overall tone of this remarkable film.