Saw Boarding Gate, an "erotic thriller" about a woman who works in an import business. She's breaking up with some high-powered CEO and negotiating with him and her boss for a trip to Beijing to manage a dance club there. Also she's involved with the drug trade. This is a complex film.
The film deals in the deep ambiguities of modern multinational global trade, which involves not only furniture and art, but drugs and humans. People and contacts show up, transfer this protagonist woman to a car and are never seen again. This murkiness is mirrored in her dying relationship with the CEO. Their relationship was sex-based and involved power dynamics. There's an early scene where they talk about her being his slave for some weekend. She orders him to say the world 'slave' over and over. Who's really in charge here?
The film is deeply murky and shadowy. It gets a lot of mileage out of the enigmatic main character just moving about in fabulous hotels, drifting opaquely from a karaoke bar into the docks to swap some plastic bags of white powder. Again though, is she pulling the heart strings of her lovers or is she in control? It's an interesting movie, very in love with the complex, shadowy worlds it inhabits and very in love with the fabulously wealthy and legally gray people who live there.
I enjoyed this movie, but I feel it was not really for me. It's use of power-dynamic-based romances leaves me a bit cold, and although I enjoyed looking into the comfortable but shadowy lives lived on the margins, I didn't wholly believe what I was seeing. I feel there would be more violence and fewer arch references to favors for friends. The film is also very interested in this woman's love life, which is not quite as compelling, but serves as a good anchor point. A decent film.
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