Director Ang Lee’s (CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN) latest excursion into Chinese period piece has all the elements of a classic spy scenario.  Young, impressionable Wang (Tang Wei) joins a college acting troupe and soon finds herself working with young resistance fighters against Chinese traitors during the Japanese Occupation of Shanghai.  The target is the sinister and ruthless Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) with whom she is coerced into a torrid sex affair in order to flush him out into the open. 

MICHAEL CLAYTON has the look of the best of the sophisticated thrillers of the 70’s – THE PARALLAX VIEW and THE CONVERSATION.  Like those two pieces, director Tony Gilroy’s MICHAEL LAYTON is as smart-looking and polished as its main star George Clooney.  Clooney plays a fixer, Michael Clayton at a legal firm.  Clayton is summoned to sort out scandalous nasties. 

When the film ends with the interviewee Colonel Paul Hughes, the U.S. Director of Strategic Policy saying: “This makes me angry”, one cannot help but feel the significance of these conclusive words on the U.S. failure in the Iraq war.  As the title of the film implies, there is still no resolution and sadly, NO END IN SIGHT.

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At the start of the film, a character remarks to the protagonist, Liffey (Kelly Reilly of MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE): “You don’t look like an architect”.  Liffey’s reply is: “What does an architect look like?” Both question and statement hold true to the film and signifies the main flaw of veteran 79-year old Nicholas Roeg’s (my favourite being THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, DON’T LOOK NOW and BAD TIMING) latest theatrical film in a while.  Liffey, all pretty and sexually charged, with her non technical dialogue, really does not come through or look remotely like an architect.  And Roeg has not idea how this supernatural gothic thriller should hold together.  Roeg is so concerned about how the film looks (no doubt, it is beautifully shot), but it is filled with countless graphic sex scenes (as though to outdo his previous movies like DON’T LOOK NOW and BAD TIMING), flashbacks and dream sequences that the film often makes no sense.  Roeg’s best features were never easy to follow, but PUFFBALL is uninteresting and nonsensical, though containing oddly enough fine performances by some good Brit actors like Rira Tushingham and Miranda Richardson.