Boarding Gate

Boarding Gate (2007)

She's losing control again.

A beautiful woman, Sandra, seduces a wealthy businessman, Miles Rennburg. Little does he realise that she has been sent to kill him at the behest of her boyfriend/crime partner, Lester. Controlling all this is Sue, Lester's wife.

Date of release
2007-08-22
TMDB
5.0 / 10 (122)
Runtime
1h 46m
Genres
Thriller, Drama
Director
Olivier Assayas

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $895K
  • Budget: $2.8M
  • Earned 0.3× its budget
  • Filmed in: Paris and Hong Kong

Boarding Gate is a 2007 French thriller film about the sophisticated power plays between a debt-ridden underworld entrepreneur, his provocative and ambitious ex-associate and a manipulative young couple who employ her. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, the film features an international cast comprising Asia Argento, Michael Madsen, Carl Ng and Kelly Lin. Kim Gordon also plays a supporting role as an enigmatic businesswoman forced to intervene as events unfold in Hong Kong.

Production

Writer-director Olivier Assayas cites the inspiration of the film's driving themes as a news story relating the murder of financier Édouard Stern during an S&M play session at the hands of his long-term lover, prostitute Cecile Brossard. The incident evoked the tone of his previous work on corporate deviancy, Demonlover, and he determined to use it as the pivotal event for a new script.

The title Boarding Gate was the director's second choice for the film. His first, departed—a reference to the passport stamp applied by Hong Kong border officials upon leaving the country—had to be scrapped during filming upon the 2006 release of Martin Scorsese's The Departed. The final title was selected since it evokes the many easy conduits in the film, "the idea of a passage between two worlds."

The film's style, described as "Eurotrash," is—according to Assayas—an experiment in "constructing a project around B-movie economics".

Assayas decided to embark on the "B-movie" concept after frustrating financial complications interminably delayed production of another of his projects, intended to be "a very French film focusing on provincial life;" similar circumstances led to making of his previous film with Maggie Cheung, Irma Vep. The total cost of the film was under €2 million.

The film was shot over six weeks in just two locations: Paris and Hong Kong. The Hong Kong crew was entirely local, with the exception of the cinematographer, the sound engineer, the assistant, the script supervisor, the line producer and the director himself. Most of the filming was done with hand-held cameras, and Assayas admits to having obtained some of his shots illegally due to the restrictive nature of local permits.

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