Set in Canada, Paris, London, San Francisco, and spoken in English, French, and Cantonese, this Olivier Assayas film contemplates the possibility of change in a person, and gives full, serious, unsentimental attention to the difficulty and uncertainty of such change. The person in question is "a junkie to the bone," the Chinese mop-top mate (a bristly mop, usable as a toilet-bowl brush) of an over-the-hill rock star who OD's on heroin and leaves his survivor with a mountain of debt and a six-month sentence for possession. Her reason for change -- her reason for taking menial jobs in a Parisian Chinese restaurant and a downscale department store -- her reason for trying to launch her own singing career, capitalizing on her fleeting celebrity as a one-time television VJ and a reviled rock widow -- is her six-year-old son, currently in the care of her Canadian parents-in-law. The oblique narrative snakes along like the trickle from a garden hose. It might puddle up on matters of no significance (a stylish concert performance by Emily Haines and the rock group Metric), and it might go underground on matters of great significance (the prison term), and its course is never propulsive yet never predictable. Maggie Cheung, off-screen wife of the director, gamely gets on board with the accepted French philosophy of acting, whereby her role, no matter how huge, is but another element in the film, not the centerpiece, not the raison d'être, no more important than the informally mingling camera, the unpicturesque settings, the hip musical selections (Brian Eno), or the smaller parts (Nick Nolte, as the father-in-law, rivalling David Janssen in constancy and depth of discomfort). Even her biggest emotional outbursts are just part of the flow. Or the trickle. They are not showstoppers. With Béatrice Dalle, Don McKellar. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd