The rising international star Asia Argento (daughter of Dario) steams up Assayas's lovingly down-and-dirty nod to Hong Kong genre films and B-movie Eurotrash, a grimy, erotically charged mash-up of the director's earlier demonlover and Irma Vep. Earning a midnight movie slot at this year's Cannes Film Festival (and suitably shocking most critics), Boarding Gate splits its focus between the bland industrial estates of Paris and the chaotic urban clutter of Hong Kong, but connects them through the sexual machinations and power struggles of the dangerously attractive drug runner Sandra (Argento), her sleazebag jet-setter ex-lover (Michael Madsen), and her current lover and boss, a Hong Kong “importer” (Karl Ng). Propulsive, lurid, and filled with bizarrely energetic moments and performances (especially Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, as a Cantonese-speaking gangster), Boarding Gate is a testament to low-budget, high-energy filmmaking, and a deliberately feisty nose-thumbing at the new global marketplace (including, as Assayas notes, “the new order of film finance”).