Father Geek here with the latest report from Albert Lanier, one of our ace island reporters in AICN's charming editor Moon Yun Choi's stable she put together for us out on the beautiful volcanic plantation slopes of the mid-Pacific's 50th state. Sooooo with no need for more from here in Central Texas its time for Albert's take on HIFF's opening night feature film...

CANNES WINNER MAGGIE CHEUNG COMES "CLEAN" IN HONOLULU

by Albert Lanier

French Director Oliver Assayas's latest film CLEAN starring renaissance actress Maggie Cheung screened on the night of Thursday, October 21st in Honolulu to open this year's Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF).

Cheung-who won Best Actress honors at this year's Cannes Film Festival for her performance in CLEAN-was on hand to briefly talk to the near capacity crowd at Downtown Honolulu's Hawaii Theater before the start of the film.

Cheung is in Hawaii to serve on the 2004 HIFF jury alongside such luminaries as film critic and professor Emanuel Levy and Australian actor David Wenham probably best known as Faramir in the THE LORD OF THE RINGS-THE TWO TOWERS.

Cheung will also recieve a special acting award from the festival for the versatility and range of her many roles in a variety of films over a twenty year period.

The large audience present at the Hawaii Theater on Thursday night got a taste of Cheung's range by watching her work in CLEAN which incidentally had its U.S. Premiere that night.

CLEAN opens with different shots of an industrial plant or two in Ontario, Canada and closes with a crane shot rising above the patio of a recording studio showing-far in the distance-the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the watery expanse spread below it. Both of these shots are important for they demonstrate that a journey has taken place, a passing from one station in life to another.

But more about that at the end.

As I mentioned, CLEAN opens with shots of industrial plants-sprawling, steam (or whatever noxious chemical) exhaling, metallic behemoths-then we cut to a car pulling in to a Motel.

A frizzy-haired woman dressed in black has gotten out of the car. This is Emily Wang, would-be singer. Her companion, a man who looks a little like actor/singer Tom Waits, has also stepped out the car and tossed her the keys to the trunk.This is Lee Houser, Emily's musician husband.

Another individual approaches them in the parking lot. This is Vernon, Lee's Manager. Some bickering soon ensues. Vernon seems a bit angry at the two. Emily tells him to lay off, heads into the motel and smiles and says a greeting to the front desk clerk.

We soon cut to a club of sorts, the kind of lower rent room where the songs are loud, the beer is probably cheap and the only reason why anybody shows up is because of who's singing and playing onstage. In this case, its a blond rocker working her pipes. At the club, Emily gets into another spat with Vernon about making deals with record labels. We later see Emily and Lee in their motel room arguing. During one outburst, Emily accuses Lee of wanting to fuck the blonde singer at the club. Emily grabs her cell phone and calls a number that the desk clerk gave her when she came back to the hotel that night. She talks to a dealer and then drives out to score some drugs.

Emily winds up shooting up in her car and spending the night there parked near a river which serves as a demarcation line between Emily and a huge plant on the opposite shore.

Come morning, Emily heads back to the motel and finds local cops swarming about the place. She tries to get into her room, telling the police officers she is the wife of Lee-who it turns out has played his last guitar solo-but they refuse her entry. Emily tries to force her way in and she is restrained and handcuffed by the cops who search her purse and find a small packet with a "certain substance" in it.

It doesn't take Scooby-doo and Shaggy to figure out that Emily will do time. Vernon comes to see her in jail and tells her that her legal fees will attended to. It looks as if she will only serve six months in prison since she wasn't physically present during Lee's death by heroin overdose.

Lee's parents Albrecht and Rosemary who live in Vancouver are notified of their son's death by the police. They have been raising Emily and Lee's son Jay since he was a baby.

The bulk of CLEAN focuses on Emily's efforts to "clean" herself up and get her life back to some semblence of stability. Emily has moved to Paris, works at a Chinese restaurant, takes Methadone to counter the Heroin and other drugs she's taken in the past. Unfortunately, her efforts don't always work. Emily gets fired from her restaurant job and has to look for work again. Still, Emily dreams of a recording career and hopes to see Jay and perhaps become some kind of mother to him.

In the meantime, Albrecht, Jay and Rosemary are London. Rosemary is in ill health and has to stay in a local hospital to have some tests done. Albrecht confers with a record company executive over CD covers for a rerelease of three of Lee's past albums. Albrecht also decides to arrange to let Emily see Jay at least for a weekend in Paris. Albrecht feels that Jay needs to know his mother and that Emily needs to take an active role in his life.

I don't want to reveal too much more about CLEAN's story for this a thoughtful and well done drama.

Maggie Cheung turns in a fine performance here as Emily. Cheung's work is more subtle than you would think (though I got a kick out of seeing her with frizzy hair and wearing a leather jacket and a metal studded bracelet) and the fire and the anger that we see her manifest in the opening scenes clearly dissipates when she lands up in jail transmogrified into an almost childlike sense of fear, discomfort and quiescence.

One of the keys to Cheung's performance is her ability to demonstrate the unease of Emily at having to reconstruct her personal world and create her own bearings, not find them. Emily is essentially- psychologically and emotionally- a little girl who hasn't fully grown up and is dependent on other people either for jobs or money or contacts. Cheung skillfully illustrates the child-like dependence of Emily effectiely in CLEAN.

The fine Canadian actor Don Mckellar fills in the role of Vernon nicely here and James Johnson does an able job of playing Lee despite his short screen time. Martha Henry turns a good performance as Rosemary.

However, the film's best performance belongs to Nick Nolte as Albrecht. Nolte takes what could have been a colorless phone-it-in role and fills it with life and subtle emotion. Nolte does a first-rate job here of playing an aging man who realizes that he can't take care of his grandson on a long term basis. Albrecht feels sympathy for Emily and has clear compassion for her plight which is interesting since a man in his position would justified in disliking Emily. We buy Albrecht's compassion because Nolte underplays his role, never getting excitable or overemotional but using his gravelly, scraggly voice in a calm but firm manner and not always reacting obviously via cliched facial expressions.

You got to hand it to Writer/Director Oliver Assayas here. He never goes for the "Ah-Hah" moments you can clearly see-such as "ah-hah she's really upset becase her dog died" or "ah-hah he wants to have sex now"-in CLEAN. Instead of going for the painfully obvious and melodramatic, Assayas wants us to see the Emily's struggle in mundane terms. There is matter of fact tone that permeates the film ranging from Emily's interrogation by a police detective to one of CLEAN's best scenes where Emily talks about doing drugs to her son Jay (who blames her for his father death) explaining the enjoyment she derived from them but how she also paying a price for her habit.

Visually, the film is also composed nicely at times thanks to DP Eric Gautier. A scene where Emily shoots up in her car has a soft focus quality to it photographically and seems sexy and erotic (thus visually foreshadowing Emily's talk to Jay at the zoo about the enjoyment of doing drugs). Another terrific shot places Emily's car smack dab in the middle in the foregrounds while in the background on the opposite shore we see a seeming immense plant spead out on both sides. It almost as if Emily is surrounded, hemmed in visually due to her pharmacological demons by a post-modern Dickensian and Dantesque synthesis of industrial blight and decay. That why the images at the start and end of CLEAN are important. We see these relatively decrepit plants at the beginning as visual metaphors for the filth of drug addiction and the accompanying life spiraling out of order and we these plants clearly. Yet we see the Golden Gate and the waters beneath it from a distance. This another metaphor representing cleanliness and heallth as well as calm and tranquility.

But Emily isn't quite there, for CLEAN is a film with a title that is not just a verb-getting "clean off of drugs, "cleaning" your life up-but, oddly enough, a noun.

"Clean" is a destination, a place, a place of contentment. Hopefully Emily will reach that place. In any event, I wish her well.

Albert Lanier out for now...