Starring Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte. In English and French with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

Directors have always cast the loves of their lives in the films that they made. Irrespective of culture (what Zhang Yimou did for Gong Li is identical to what Josef von Sternberg did for Marlene Dietrich) and gender (Jean Marais benefited as much from Jean Cocteau's sexual infatuation as Liv Ullmann did from Ingmar Bergman's erotic enthusiasm), this literal projection of shared passion onto the screen appears to be one of world cinema's true constants.

At present, Olivier Assayas and Mag?gie Cheung probably constitute the most interesting "involved" director-star couple to still cohabit on and off the set. A former critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Assayas enjoyed a modest reputation as a competent filmmaker until he teamed up with Cheung to shoot Irma Vep, a celebration of the transnational nature of cinema that, in Hegelian terms, seemed to suggest that the cinematic Zeitgeist was alive and well and living in Asia (a claim that would be difficult to dispute, by the way). Cheung, of course, was already well-known as one of Hong Kong's top stars, being equally adept at action and drama, so it's probably safe to say that she was more celebrated than he at the time of their marriage.

Still, based on the quality of their joint collaborations thus far, professional jealousy does not seem to have interfered with their working relationship.

Clean, the couple's latest collaboration, is very much Cheung's movie. Set in Canada (when was the last time you saw footage lensed in Hamilton?), London, Paris, and the United States, the film follows the trajectory of Emily (Cheung), a former pop-TV star and the widow of a once-famous rock 'n' roller who must try to carve out a niche for herself after her husband ODs and she herself goes to prison for shooting junk. To make matters worse, her extreme in-betweenness (reflected by both the ease with which she switches from English to French to Cantonese and her gender-blind approach to loving) makes fitting into the straight world even harder for her than it is for most ex-cons.

In addition to the usual post-prison questions ("Can I stop sticking needles in my arm?"), Emily must convince both her wary-though-kind father-in-law (Nick Nolte, in top form) that she's responsible enough to look after her silently accusatory son and herself that she's really a singer of talent and not just some drug-damaged, glorified groupie.

To her credit, Cheung never plays the glamour card even once. She shows Emily's warts as well as her spunk, her terrifying weakness as well as her sometimes surprising strength. She doesn't show us either a diva or a Courtney Love-style she-demon.

Instead she does something much harder. She creates a real person.