Boarding Gate (2007) on Netflix

R20071h 46m

Sandra seduces Miles Rennberg, a debt-ridden Paris entrepreneur, at the bidding of Lester Wang, her lover, who has sent her to kill him. Miles wants her for himself.

Netflix2.4/5
IMDb5.1/104,437 votes
Rotten Tomatoes32%

Trailer

Plot summary

In Paris, Sandra, once Miles Rennberg's lover and accomplice in his schemes, comes to his office with a proposition: capital for a nightclub in Beijing. She plays on their history, and Miles, keener on the woman than on the club, invites her to his apartment. Sandra also works at an import business run by Lester Wang and his wife Sue, and she and Lester are lovers; on the side she runs drugs, with Lisa as her driver and lookout. A deal goes wrong when the buyer turns out to be a narcotics officer, and Lester, who has been asking about a missing container, follows her there and drives her home. Sandra then agrees to visit Miles.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Boarding Gate (2007)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Writer-director Olivier Assayas took the film's pivotal event from a news story: financier Édouard Stern was murdered during an S&M session by his long-term lover. The case echoed the corporate deviancy of his earlier film, Demonlover.
Most of Boarding Gate was shot with hand-held cameras, and Assayas says some shots were obtained illegally because Hong Kong permits were so restrictive. The "guerrilla shots" used a four-person skeleton crew that fled the scene afterwards.
Assayas's first title choice was "departed", a reference to the passport stamp Hong Kong border officials apply on leaving, but it had to be scrapped during filming after Martin Scorsese's The Departed came out in 2006.
The scenes of the relationship between Asia Argento's Sandra and Michael Madsen's Miles were shot in chronological order, and the two actors met for the first time on camera during the shoot of their reunion scene.
Assayas turned to the film after financial complications delayed another project, and made it as an experiment in "B-movie economics", with a total cost under €2 million.
Assayas called Asia Argento "inseparable from the narrative" and cast Michael Madsen later through a mutual association with Nick Nolte, after searching for an actor who suited the part's physical properties.