Clean - Maggie Cheung

[Berri]

Maggie Cheung stars in some American? movie called "Clean". Where to locate/where can I get it?

[ballzer]

Havent seen it yet. Should be out on video. Maggie won the Best Actress at last year's Cannes Film Festival. Here's the movie synopsis:

Directed by: Olivier Assayas

Synopsis: Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung) is a woman who wrestles with her dream of becoming a singer, her fitness as a mother, and daily life without her partner Lee (James Johnston). Her past is riddled with drugs and regrets, the result of which left Lee dead in a desolate motel room in Hamilton, Ontario, and landed Emily with a six-month jail sentence. The only thing that she desires for the future is a loving relationship with her son Jay, who is being cared for by Lee's parents, Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry). While Rosemary blames Emily for the death of Lee, Albrecht recognizes the importance of the bond between a mother and her son, and his faith sets the standard for the faith Emily must find in herself. Clean follows Emily to Hamilton, Paris, London and San Francisco and in three languages (English, French and Cantonese), as she battles for a place in a world reluctant to forget the woman she has been and unwilling to accept her as the woman she longs to be.


Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte

[ballzer]

It's coming out on DVD. You can order it here.

Order Here - Linky


Clean Region 3 DVD - Maggie Cheung

Product Info:
The Korean DVD release represents the first home video release of Clean worldwide! The special edition DVD comes with the following features:

Interviews with director Olivier Assayas, Maggie Cheung, and the cast.
Highlighted Scenes
Music Video
Trailer

Languages: Cantonese, Mandarin, English, French
Subtitles: Korean , English

[Berri]

Aha! My first post was about this movie. Finally, it's making its way to the American screen....I discovered an article in the New York Times featuring a review on this movie. It was shot a few years ago, leading Maggie to win the Best Actress award in Cannes Film Festival. She use to be married to the French director of this film.

New York Times Movie Review
Maggie Cheung Is All Washed Up but Holding Out Hope for Redemption in 'Clean'

WITH: Maggie Cheung (Emily Wang), Nick Nolte (Albrecht Hauser), James Dennis (Jay), Béatrice Dalle (Elena), Jeanne Balibar (Irène Paolini), Don McKellar (Vernon) and Martha Henry (Rosemary Hauser).

Maggie Cheung as a recovering drug addict and aspiring singer with James Dennis as her son in "Clean."



Countless episodes of the old VH1 series "Behind the Music" have drummed into our heads the hazards of living the rock 'n' roll life after a certain age.

"Clean" is one of the few fiction films to evoke realistically the grubby texture of existence for second- and third-tier rock celebrities crumbling under a combination of fading renown and drug addiction.

As this fine French film, written and directed by Olivier Assayas, leapfrogs from Canada to London to Paris to San Francisco, its jangling rhythms reflect the shattered nervous system of its desperate central character, Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung), a recovering heroin addict and aspiring rock singer.

Ms. Cheung deservedly won best actress at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of Emily, the surviving half of a fading rock 'n' roll couple, both junkies, as she faces a bleak, uncertain future after her partner's death. The reckless phase of her life crashes to a halt when Lee Hauser (James Johnston), her 42-year-old common-law husband, dies from an accidental overdose in a Canadian motel room. Returning to the motel, which she had left after a brutal quarrel with Lee, Emily is arrested, charged with heroin possession and sentenced to six months in prison.

On her release, Emily finds herself broke and treated disdainfully by old friends who blame her for Lee's death and doubt that she can change her self-destructive ways. Either she reinvents herself or she goes down for the count.

Emily, who has beauty, talent and charisma and is fluently multilingual, still dreams of a career in music. She sings her own darkly mystical lyrics in a throaty growl that suggests a fusion of Marianne Faithfull and Yoko Ono. But her high-strung, fiercely willful temperament makes her her own worst enemy; her tolerance for frustration is near zero.

She and Lee have a young son, Jay (James Dennis), who lives in Vancouver with Lee's parents, Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry), who are facing their declining years. When the Hausers visit London to settle their son's estate (now suddenly worth something because of his posthumous notoriety), Albrecht reaches out to Emily despite his trepidations.

A thoughtful, philosophic man with a tough inner core, Albrecht brings out a side of Mr. Nolte rarely seen on the screen, and he gives a deep and touching portrayal of a haggard, beleaguered older man trying to do the right thing as he imagines the future of the beloved grandson he and his wife have raised from infancy.

Any rapprochement between Albrecht and his daughter-in-law must be undertaken surreptitiously because Rosemary, who is in a London hospital undergoing tests for cancer, hates Emily unequivocally. As she rebuilds her life, Emily gradually becomes determined to establish a relationship with Jay, whose grandmother has poisoned him against her. The second half of "Clean" finds her taking the first steps to become a responsible mother and provider. She finds jobs, first as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant and later as a saleswoman in a department store.

Unlike the majority of recovery stories, in which sensationalism seesaws with gooey sentimental uplift, "Clean" shows just how hard it is to start life over in a lower key. Avoiding shortcuts and sugar-coated palliatives, it portrays Emily's acceptance of a more prosaic future as a torturous, quotidian process that moves in fits and starts. Although the screenplay doesn't go into pharmaceutical detail, she progresses from methadone, through illicitly obtained painkillers and marijuana toward relative stability and sobriety.

As it follows Emily's uncertain redemption, "Clean" gets sidetracked in subplots involving her sexually ambiguous relationships with women and the complicated, often careless erotic connections among her female acquaintances. This part of the film intends to evoke the way adventurous women on the bohemian fringe of the rock world casually break conventional boundaries. But these scenes, despite their intriguing implications, are finally more distracting than enlightening and slow down the film.

Eventually, "Clean" earns the goodwill that its screenplay has Albrecht express during one of his edgy conversations with Emily. "I believe in forgiveness," he declares slowly and deliberately, with intense emotion. "People change. If they need to, they change."