Asia Argento writes stories and novels, directs music videos, documentaries, and feature films, and

Asia Argento writes stories and novels, directs music videos, documentaries, and feature films, and appears in movies, sometimes with her clothes on. In Olivier Assayas’s new international thriller, “Boarding Gate,” she plays Sandra, a very smart prostitute. In the past, Sandra has done some nasty work for a Paris-based investor (Michael Madsen) who was also her lover—she slept with his clients and listened to their secrets. Now she’s working at an import-export company, receiving drugs sewn into the bottom of plush armchairs, and she wants freedom—an escape to China, which is treated in this movie as the Wild East of capitalism. Slinking into the frame, with her lower lip hanging loose, Argento’s Sandra is both dependent on men and contemptuous of them, both seductive and unsure of herself, a dirty girl who may be looking for love



one reason that the French director Olivier Assayas made “Boarding Gate” is that he wanted to watch the Italian actress Asia Argento strut around in black underwear and punishing heels. And why not? Ms. Argento looks delectable if somewhat demented in “Boarding Gate,” in which she comes across as a postmodern Pearl White, who starred in silent adventure serials like “The Perils of Pauline.” Ms. Argento seems to invite trouble, and Mr. Assayas, who has a way of capturing the seemingly ineffable, has a thing for troubled, troubling women.