I’m fairly certain one reason that the French director Olivier Assayas made “Boarding Gate” is that he wanted to watch the Italian actress Asia Argento strut around in black underwear and punishing heels. And why not? Ms. Argento looks delectable if somewhat demented in “Boarding Gate,” in which she comes across as a postmodern Pearl White, who starred in silent adventure serials like “The Perils of Pauline.” Ms. Argento seems to invite trouble, and Mr. Assayas, who has a way of capturing the seemingly ineffable, has a thing for troubled, troubling women.

“Boarding Gate,” a casually beautiful, preposterously plotted, elliptical thriller, earned little love last year when it played at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown out of competition. It didn’t do much for Mr. Assayas’s reputation, at least among some critics, who had been just as eager to dismiss his other recent films, among them “Clean” (2004) and the much-maligned “demonlover” (2002). What “Boarding Gate” did do was reconfirm Ms. Argento as one of contemporary cinema’s most fascinating creatures. Her on-screen ferocity is now generating as much interest as her tattoos — an angel hovers above her pubic bone, and an eye stares out from one shoulder — or the ease with which she sheds her clothes, which explains why I can describe those tattoos with confidence.

In truth, thriller is a convenient but imprecise descriptor for “Boarding Gate,” which resists categorization despite Mr. Assayas’s stated insistence that he was trying (really) to make a B movie in English. Much like “demonlover” this new film plays with various genre codes and conventions — the femme fatale, violence, murder, an atmosphere of danger and dread — but plays with them very differently than most run-of-the-mill modern thrillers. Indeed both films depend on your having at least a passing familiarity with the kind of anonymously produced slick flicks — slickly packaged, slicked with blood — that are an industry staple from Hollywood to Hong Kong. You may not remember the names of these industrial entertainments, but they’re invariably playing on a screen near you.

Despite Mr. Assayas’s interest in genre there is something in him that either rebels against the obvious or is simply incapable of delivering the same-old, same-old movie-packaged fun and death. It seems fitting then that the first and final images in “Boarding Gate” are so blurred you can’t tell what you’re looking at. Yet even after the opening image comes into focus — two men fire guns at an indoor shooting range — you realize you still don’t know what you’re watching. Seeing is believing (something, sometimes), but seeing isn’t knowing, Mr. Assayas likes to remind us. And so in “Boarding Gate” he racks up one eye-catching incident after another (involving sadomasochistic sex, pooling blood and smuggled drugs) that swirl on screen with little apparent connection.

It’s actually easy to make story sense of “Boarding Gate” if you go with Mr. Assayas’s oblique strategies. Ms. Argento is Sandra, the former lover of a shifty, financially struggling American businessman, Miles (Michael Madsen), who lives, works and plays rough in Paris. An ex-prostitute, Sandra wants to make a new life running a club in Beijing, but she needs money, which leads her back to Miles as well as to a shady couple, Lester and Sue (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin). Murder and mystery lead Sandra to Hong Kong where guns are drawn and discharged. At one point Kim Gordon, the frontwoman for Sonic Youth, shows up, barking orders in Cantonese, a moment of delirium in what has become an increasingly unhinged enterprise.

In “demonlover,” which involves corporate intrigue and pornography, sex is a commodity and a spectacle, a means of control and a weapon of power. Business transactions resemble mating rituals, and sexual encounters are as erotic as watching traders skirmish at the Stock Exchange. The sex in “Boarding Gate” is more complicated, partly because Sandra isn’t just a conduit for Mr. Assayas’s ideas — she isn’t simply another of cinema’s overdetermined whores — but also an identifiably real, cringingly human character. “Demonlover,” with its sleek surfaces, slippery ideas and pulp flourishes, is a perfect critical object. But “Boarding Gate,” despite its periodic and self-conscious outlandishness, feels much more tethered to lived experience, which is Mr. Assayas’s great subject.

It can be easy to overlook this investment in real life, but only because the shiny surfaces of his films, with their excesses and putatively exotic locales, are so beguiling and even distracting. “Boarding Gate” certainly offers plenty of visual distractions, the image of Ms. Argento getting down and dirty with Mr. Madsen included. And there is no question that Mr. Assayas, a former film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, knows full well the commercial value of female nudity and not just its aesthetic charm. That said, even in “Boarding Gate,” a modestly scaled, self-consciously tawdry exercise in genre appropriation, Mr. Assayas manages to say more about what it is to be human — to desire, to fear, to be alone — than most filmmakers say in a lifetime.

As always, it’s easy to be dazzled by Mr. Assayas’s camerawork — the way he catches a person’s movement as well as the volition behind that movement — but watching “Boarding Gate” I was again struck by how he uses music to amplify reality, almost as if he were inviting you to listen to the songs playing in other people’s heads. His use of Brian Eno here is particularly potent. Mr. Eno creates music that drifts around you, enveloping you in moods and waves of feeling, which is precisely what Mr. Assayas does as a filmmaker. Mr. Eno has said that for him making popular music is about “creating new, imaginary worlds and inviting people to join them,” a sentiment that Mr. Assayas no doubt understands.