By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Something a little brutal: Olivier Assayas goes Clean
In the NY Times, Charles Taylor admires Olivier Assayas admiring his own beautifully jumpy new movie, Clean and his ex, Maggie Cheung. Making with the odd metaphor, Taylor writes, “To watch Ms. Cheung’s performance is to see someone who, as Garbo did, uses the camera as though it were radio transmitter, trusting it to pick up the inchoate moods that move across her face. That talent dovetails with Mr. Assayas’s carefully chosen music… several songs composed by Dean Wareham, late of the band Luna and David Roback, late of Mazzy Star, and sung by Ms. Cheung in a style both wafting and grounded…. Mr. Assayas said that Clean was the closest he had come to the style he wishes for his films. 
“In terms of camerawork, editing, in terms of the way they interact with the characters, in terms of closeness to the human material… but also, at the same time, in terms of brushstrokes, in terms of an abstract visual energy that would connect with the emotions, I really got hold of something I had been looking for in a couple of films.” A movie, Assayas tells Taylor, “has to leave things open up to a certain level so that somehow the viewer has some space within the film… I think that it’s important to understand, intuitively understand, what you are doing… But when you are doing it you must follow instinct. There has to be a certain level of risk, creating images, characters, emotions, it involves something a little brutal. You must be prepared to go in areas where you lose control… There’s such a broad way of representing the world, and specifically representing a world that has become so complex with totally different …articulations…. I like the adventure of making films… And the adventure of making films has to do with the capacity you have of listening to your guts.”
