Clean

Olivier Assayas, 2004
This film is typically Assayas, note perhaps a slight leverage to focus on straightforward 'beauty', landscapes. Also perhaps slightly more muted long shots, as suitable for the film's tone. Not that his images aren't always excellently composed. The landscapes are industrial, dull with harsh electronic lights, metal, plastic, glass, grey with bursts of red or blue or anything else still shocking, but absorbed in what is around it. Assayas often shoots at night (or in harsh daylight), and some of the scenes I found here most distinctive were in a kind of half-dark, certainly street lamps on, but not pitch black sky.
Music is clearly important for Assayas, and, when we have examples like some of the electronics in 'demonlover', can really do something with the image. Perhaps, though, it too often can feel more like an appendage, at worst a touch mawkish.
On paper, this is a slightly lame story, and does threaten to fall over at times (some cast memeber's acting seems a bit melodramtic, or just downright odd), and there's a slight lack of self-awareness. Yet Assayas Gives such a look, full of the ephemera, the busrts of colour (literally and rythm-wise), of the modern that it always rises far above. Assayas shades with so many tones; of emotion, of character, nothing is simple, yet there is a kinf of clearness. Each character is shown in context, in sympathy, on their comfortable grounds, and away. We don't realise that any one point is in a line inteersecting with every other, die to the interest alone on each strand, but they are.
Motivation is really not the game for Assayas; characters, in his full and busy (quite literally; the transport hubs, the impersonal streets full of people) cities, are just deperately trying to live. The physical affects, alienated, cries for self-preservation. Apart from perhaps Kiarostami, I'm not sure I know a director who can tell a Western European more about what it feels like to live, in a realist manner, away from the artworld, right now.