About 20 minutes into the annoying Boarding Gate, I was wishing Olivier Assayas had made something like Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim instead. The two films really aren’t all that dissimilar, working within the form and generally limited grammar of the crime / thriller genre. (Assayas did tell the audience, before the film started, that he wanted to make a B-movie with a “French independent movie budget”. I’m sure the French have different conceptions of what a B-movie is like, though.) All the right elements are intact in Assayas’ film - the gun in the handbag, international airports, the shadowy company that traffics in vague semi-legalities, the package of drugs hidden in the furniture, a chase that involves scurrying through the warrens of a restaurant’s kitchen - and, most important, “a woman in trouble”, as David Lynch would put it. (The said girl in peril comes in the form of a disappointingly greasy-looking Asia Argento, who looks sleep-deprived for most of the film.)

But while Hartley (and Assayas’ fellow countryman Godard) understood the inherent narrative silliness of the genre, Assayas overcooks Boarding Gate, immersing it in a queasy sordidness that fools the audience into thinking that there’s a grander, more serious undercurrent behind its vacuity, that there’s something larger at stake. There isn’t. And if the sleaze was indeed the point, it misses its mark; it’s not even enjoyable sleaze. (Some guy was talking angrily with another in the Pacific Film Archives bathroom after the movie, shouting, “Abel Ferrara makes ten of these films and nobody gives a shit!”)

I had high hopes for the second half of the film, when Argento’s character slips bloodily from the sweaty clutches of a fleshy Michael Madsen (in the sort of role that Mickey Rourke would have played twenty years ago) and ends up lost and disoriented in Hong Kong, but no such luck; Boarding Gate remains a cold and humorless genre exercise. (It’s even more disappointing considering the fact that the last time I saw Assayas in the flesh was for a Q&A session after his magnificent Irma Vep. Plus he had Maggie Cheung standing next to him. I remember very little about the Q&A, actually, except my thoughts at the time: OH MY GOD I’M BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS MAGGIE CHEUNG.)

Actually I take “humorless” back: the one funny moment in the film comes when Kim Gordon makes a cameo appearance, stomping angrily into the movie and barking orders in Cantonese. But if you didn’t recognize Kim Gordon, or didn’t know who she was—oh well.