The French filmmaker Olivier Assayas is probably best known for
Irma Vep, a 1996 update of
Day for Night, about the efforts of a movie director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his squad of technicians and assistants who were all trying to make a modern version of the silent movie serial
Les Vampires, with Maggie Cheung, as herself, slinking about the set in a black cat suit. (My favorite detail may have been the lackey whose job was to hang around Maggie with a little squirt bottle to make sure her outfit stayed shiny.) Since then, Assayas has certainly established himself as a man of wide-ranging ambitions. His movies have ranged from the aging-friends ensemble drama
Lat August, Early September and
Les destinées sentimentales, a three-hour family drama set in the nineteenth century, to
Demonlover, which ended with its anti-heroine, Connie Nielson, ensnared in a
Videodrome-like S & M website, where she was last seen trussed up in fetish gear and waiting for her fate to be determined by some kid a million miles away who'd logged on using his dad's credit card, and the trash-fest
Boarding Gate. Whatever their subject matter, Assayas's films are always intelligent, handsomely mounted, and intriguing; the one thing they generally lack is a pulse. They're not overly predetermined, like the work of some smart guys who make dull movies, but they do seem more thought-out than felt, and this can make the experience of being bored by them more frustrating than it is at sloppier movies. This is especially so in the case of his provocations, like
Boarding Gate, which is like a self-conscious attempt to create the ultimate nightmare fantasy of rough sex and paranoid thrills; fighting to keep from falling asleep while Asia Argento is running around in her underwear executing people and being pursued by the agents of Kim Gordon can make you feel awfully jaded. Assayas's new one,
Summer Hours, is as boring as anything he's ever done, but the nice thing about it is, it sounds as if it
ought to be boring, thus restoring some of your faith in a logical universe.
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