‘Clean’ gets right to the real dirt

“Clean” opens and closes on antithetical landscapes. At the start, Emily (Maggie Cheung) pulls into a motel in rural industrial Ontario with her husband, Lee Hauser (James Johnston), a fading rock star with a heroin habit that his fans, friends and family attribute to her influence. At the end of the film, Emily emerges from a recording studio, having kicked the habit, laid down a series of original tracks she wrote while in jail following Lee’s fatal overdose, and reconnected with her young son. She looks out over the deck and surveys San Francisco. That’s better.

Director Olivier Assayas, who was no longer married to Cheung when he made “Clean,” takes what could be called a post-romantic approach to the rock ‘n’ roll junkie lifestyle, neither idealizing nor condemning it, just wondering what comes later. He has a tendency to shoot intense emotional moments from a respectful distance, as a way of deflecting some attention from the inherent bombast of drug-related drama. (When Rosemary Hauser, played by Martha Henry, learns of her son’s death, she runs into the yard like a spooked animal with her husband darting behind her trying to grab hold.) The director also has a way of making toxic landscapes look beautiful, as though they’ve been layered in gauze, and is as frank about the uses of oblivion as he is about the is-this-all-there-is quality of mundane life. (Though in this regard, no one touches Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy.”)

Lee’s parents, Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary, have been caring for his and Emily’s son, Jay (James Dennis), for an indeterminate amount of time, but it’s long enough that Lee and Emily never so much as mention him before the overdose. Of course, Emily’s most-hated-woman-in-rock status extends to her in-laws -- Rosemary tells Jay that Emily gave Lee the drugs that killed him, and Jay believes her. So, after her release, following a brief meeting with Albrecht in a coffee shop to sort out the last of the (paltry) financial details, Emily decides to move back to Paris, where she lived before she became involved with Lee. Albrecht suggests it would be best if she didn’t see Jay for a while, at least until she gets a job and gets her life together.

“Clean” is one of those movies that’s slightly off the mark in ways that are hard to put a finger on, but it is shot so soulfully and features such beautiful performances that it’s easy to forgive the occasional false note. The hardest to swallow is the character of Emily, a Yoko Ono/Courtney Love/Lady Macbeth type who isn’t given much dimension or much of a chance to live down her image as the wrong kind of iconoclast.

Emily’s own so-called career peaked six years earlier, when she was a VJ on an MTV-style cable network. Since then, she’s focused on being the “longtime bad influence” Lee’s circle and journalists love to hate. Upon returning to Paris, she runs into more than one former fan of her show, but the experiences are more humbling than ego-gratifying. After getting fired from a Chinese restaurant owned by her uncle, Emily tries to reconnect with a former lover, scene-maker-turned-network-producer Irene Paolini (Jeanne Balibar), who humiliatingly finds her a job selling women’s active wear to tourists at Printemps.

Nolte is wonderful as the gruff grandfather dealing with the serious illness of his wife and doing what he can to piece together a life for Jay in which he can feel safe, cared for and loved. But Emily’s interest in her son, following years of neglect, comes suddenly and unexpectedly -- and it feels like a cop-out on the part of the character, the director or both. Maybe because Emily is so unlikable to begin with, Assayas stays far away from the movie’s most pressing question. Why, suddenly, does Emily care? Is her interest in Jay purely selfish? And if so, why not confront it?

Instead, Emily is allowed, slowly, to reenter the world of the living and find her way into adult life for the first time in her 40s with few serious consequences, and it makes her character, who doesn’t quite seem to jibe with the scene, feel a little hollow. But it’s the small, gradual emotional adjustments Emily goes through -- more than the process of her “recovery” or adapting to workaday life -- that makes “Clean” as unexpectedly riveting as it is. Assayas’ interest lies in examining the stage that follows a sort of scorched earth approach to youth -- a narrow but rich field that could certainly do with more cultivation.

*

‘Clean’

MPAA rating: R for language, drug content and brief nudity

A Palm Pictures release. Writer-director Olivier Assayas. Director of photography Eric Gautier. Editor Lun Barnier. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

In English, French and Chinese with English subtitles.

Exclusively at Laemmle’s Playhouse Cinemas, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena (626) 844-6500; Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. (323) 848-3500.