Boarding Gate is a 2007 French thriller film about the sophisticated power plays between a debt-ridden underworld entrepreneur, his provocative and ambitious ex-associate and a manipulative young couple who employ her.
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, the film features an international cast comprising Asia Argento, Michael Madsen, Carl Ng and Kelly Lin.
Brazenly taunting him with her sexuality, she bluntly dissects their prior relationship—a nightmarish web of masochism, money, manipulation and dependency, pimping her out to dangerous clients in order to gain both a business advantage and perverse personal thrills.
Goading him with recollections of their misdeeds, she reveals a deep-seated bitterness; she recalls, in particular, an incident where a group of Japanese clients she was entertaining drugged and raped her, and Miles' arousal at hearing the episode recounted in front of his girlfriend.
With little money and no recourse to her credit cards or passport, due to risk of capture and extradition for Miles' murder, Sandra resorts to repeatedly calling Lester.
Writer-director Olivier Assayas cites the inspiration of the film's driving themes as a news story relating the murder of financier Édouard Stern during an S&M play session at the hands of his long-term lover, prostitute Cecile Brossard.
His first, departed—a reference to the passport stamp applied by Hong Kong border officials upon leaving the country—had to be scrapped during filming upon the 2006 release of Martin Scorsese's The Departed.
Lead actress Asia Argento was considered by the director to be "inseparable from the narrative"; protagonist Michael Madsen was cast later via a mutual association with Nick Nolte, as Assayas conducted a search for an actor suited to the physical properties of the role.
[5] Kelly Lin and Carl Ng, playing the ambitious Wong couple, were selected as good examples of the "new generation" of actors working in the Hong Kong film industry.
[5] Kim Gordon, whose acting roles had been considerably undemanding before Boarding Gate,[7] had worked with Assayas previously with the music for Irma Vep and Demonlover.
[5] Wayne State University professor of English Steven Shaviro, author of The Cinematic Body, has composed a lengthy essay[8] on the themes of conduits and interchangeability in the world of global capitalism as they are explored and visualized in Boarding Gate.
[13] Even the more positive pieces comment on this, such as Slant's review by David Pratt-Robinson, which remarks that lead actress Asia Argento "looks ready to rape anything in sight".
[14] The film's acting inspired a wide range of critical opinion, although the view that Asia Argento is one of the most appealing aspects of Boarding Gate is nearly universal.
The Village Voice's J. Hoberman takes this common remark to its extreme, when juxtaposed with a scathing review of the film—"There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento.
"[16] Describing her as "aggressively carnal", New York magazine's David Edelstein makes the wry remark that he "can't help thinking there was a mix-up at the hospital and her dad was Klaus Kinski.
"[17] David Pratt-Robinson had a positive take on the character: "so fierce and so fragile,... a global misfit, a citizen of the world who can't quite find her place...yet, somehow, she makes the idea of being in transit feel like home."
Whilst criticizing her general approach to acting as "bluffing her way through", The New Yorker's David Denby similarly describes Sandra as "lewd and hungry, but she's not boring — the character keeps changing, and you can see Argento's mind working behind all the viperish moves.