Critics reviews

The film deploys its humanistic style in the service of legitimately interesting humans, who relate to each other in plausible, demanding, and affecting ways... Its sense of space and of place are beyond reproach, and without a Babel-like bone in its body, it captures the essence of a contemporary life lived across the outmoded borders of nation, region, genre, or conventionally defined gender roles—a life riven with self-destructive impulses but beginning to sound the first notes of stability.

Assayas, always a director unusually attentive to locking together song and image, whose proposed next project is a concert movie with Sonic Youth, has made his first real rock ‘n' roll film here—and an excessively astute one, at that... Beyond its function as a kick-the-habit melodrama—though it is that at base, and a restrained, remarkably modulated example of its type—Clean enacts a marketplace tragedy, a kind-of rock music New Grub Street for the era of global capitalism.

Assayas embraces the conventions and then transcends them – that is, no matter how many dozens of movies we've seen about junkies trying to go straight or how the death of a loved one can sark survivors to re-examine their own lives, the emotional truthfulness of Clean enters into our bloodstreams with its muted vigor, and we find ourselves getting hooked by this tale of getting unhooked.

Emily is a pill in any language, and I quickly tired of her seemingly endless whimpering and whining. Albrecht is a model of patience and sobriety by comparison, though he retains a healthy skepticism about the durability of Emily's professed reformation. The music, such as it is, sounds to these untutored ears like a tedious mélange of rock and rap, with Cheung's talk-sing delivery a distinct liability. Assayas has given us an international soap opera with little or no dramatic substance.

Visually assured, beautifully acted, it's a movie of scrupulous straightforwardness — so matter of fact that you scarcely expect the emotional wallop it delivers at the end...

Assayas' filmography is loaded with curveballs... so it's surprising that he'd play conventional movie-of-the-week material this straight. Though enhanced by a choice soundtrack (the use of Brian Eno is particularly strong), beautiful widescreen cinematography, and Assayas' usual cosmopolitan touch, Clean doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel. The film gets its distinction from the performances by Cheung and Nolte, whose scenes together are suffused with loss and unexpected mutual compassion.

Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star's formidable smile once or twice and never demands our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave. All the same and despite Cheung's deserved Best Actress win at Cannes, the feigned intimacy with inexpressible bio-emotional conditions like addiction and detox leaves us, as it almost always does, on the outside.

Clean is like Assayas's attempt to update Josef Von Sternberg's "dress you up in my love" films with Marlene Dietrich, only swapping out pan-Asian exoticism, square-jawed studs, and "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" for globetrotting cosmopolitanism, indie hipster refuse, and Brian Eno. You get the sense that the two divorced on the set of this film just to ramp up credibility a tad, even if the film's spent enough time in small distributor hell to disprove that theory.

Weak, self-absorbed, ill-tempered, and devoid of glamour even in her casual bisexuality, the protagonist is a systematic inversion of the hot star Cheung played in the earlier movie, and despite her skilled acting (which was honored at Cannes), she can't make the woman very interesting in her own right—the most compelling performance here is Nolte's.

One false move and the movie would be plunged into some Sid & Nancy-cum-Kramer vs. Kramer morass of needlepoint bathos. But Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte not only give two beautifully modulated performances here, they also serve as emotional compass points—there's something very exact and indicative about how they locate inchoate feelings and make them resonant, palpable.

This is absolutely Cheung's movie. In Clean's most indelible scene, Emily caresses the bare back of a man lying dead in his bed, having suffered a drug overdose. It's not Lee. But from the color vanished from Emily's face and the quivering of her body, it's clear that it might as well be. It's one of Cheung's finest screen moments.

It has much of the same appealing, free-wheeling looseness that so invigorated Irma Vep – but only once does it really hit the magical heights of that earlier film. That coup de cinema is the shooting-up scene, when Eric Gautier's camera shows a remarkable widescreen, distinctly Michael Mann-ish nocturnal shot of the car, the river and the plant beyond.