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'Boarding Gate'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | Newsday Staff Writer

March 21, 2008

It's hard to feel indifferent about an actor who pronounces the silent b in numb like a popping bubble. Lazy enunciation is perhaps the least exasperating distinction of Asia Argento, who seems like a glove-fit for Olivier Assayas' mixed bag of a thriller.

Here she plays Sandra, an ex-prostitute transitioning from a nowhere S & M relationship with a married American businessman, Miles ( Michael Madsen), to a slightly more promising dalliance with a married Chinese businessman, Lester (Carl Ng). Sandra and Lester share an illicit relationship of convenience: Sandra uses Lester's Hong Kong trading business to smuggle drugs, while Lester uses Sandra to snuff out unwanted competition. The law on her trail, Sandra is whisked to Hong Kong, only to find herself in even muddier waters.

"Boarding Gate" feels like two separate but conjoined movies that mold their personalities to their milieus. The first, set in America, is a brooding, occasionally soporific, sexual power play between Sandra and Miles; Argento and Madsen are all charged up with the demented erotic current of a played-out couple who can't quite let go. The second act is a tense, bloodstained suspense melodrama with a Hong Kong action-flick undercurrent. The picture grows on you, as does its laconic leading lady, whose slurry delivery conceals an ever-alert mouse handily equipped to beat the cat at his own game. 1:46 (sexuality, nudity, violence, language).

BOARDING GATE (unrated). At Cinema Village, Manhattan.