Clean (2004) - film review

For several years, Emily has been in a relationship with Lee Hauser, a forty-something rock singer who finds it increasingly difficult to get contracts for his work.  During a disastrous promotional tour in Canada, Lee and Emily fall out and Lee ends up killing himself through a heroin overdose.   Having served a prison sentence for illegal possession of drugs, Emily returns to Paris and sets about rebuilding her life.  Her dearest wish is to be reunited with her young son, Jay, who has been placed in the custody of Lee’s elderly parents.  Making a fresh start proves to be a lot harder than Emily realised. She has no money, no job, and everyone blames her for Lee’s death. But she is determined to see it through…

With Clean, a remarkably poignant account of a woman struggling to repair a life that has been all but ruined by drugs and personal tragedy, Olivier Assayas confirms himself as one the finest film directors of his generation.  It’s a surprisingly understated film, somewhat more thoughtful and restrained than much of Assayas’s earlier work.  Both the narrative approach and cinematographic technique are pretty conventional, more or less what you would find in most quality French film dramas (albeit tainted with Assayas’s customary austere edge), and it is probably this lack of stylistic artifice that makes the film so engaging.  Without the distraction of overly artistic camerawork or design, the focus stays on lead actress Maggie Cheung (Assayas’s former wife and star of his earlier film Irma Vep) for much of the film, showing the world from her character’s perspective, and allowing the audience to establish a very close rapport with her.

The film’s impact is undeniably driven by Cheung’s exceptional performance (probably her best to date) – one that, whilst being very restrained, conveys great emotional force, pathos and a striking sense of realism.   The sequences near the end of the film where Emily attempts a faltering reconciliation with her young son have a kind of stark poetry that is rare in cinema nowadays, conveying a very basic humanity, the bond between a mother and her child.   This is a beautiful film which explores some universal themes with great compassion and understanding – themes such as redemption, self-belief and the power of love to heal the wounds of the past.

© James Travers 2007

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