Olivier Assayas was startled one day to read the scandalous news report of a sadomasochistic murder. “It was the story of this famous banker who was found in his place in Geneva,” the French filmmaker said. “He was wearing this latex suit and he was tied up and had been shot in the back of the head a few times by someone who was obviously his girlfriend. She locked herself in a room in Sydney, Australia, freaked out, came back, and was arrested, and to this day this has not been in court.”

What was startling to Mr. Assayas, 53, whose work (“Clean,” “Irma Vep”) often pulses at the most visceral edges of human experience, wasn’t so much the kink. It was how closely the incident might have fit into his 2002 film “demonlover,” which mapped complex relationships among global commodities, corporate intrigue, cyberporn, and sexual power games. “I thought to myself, ‘Real life is stealing from my film. I’ll take it back.'”

Thus, the director’s new film, “Boarding Gate,” which opens Friday, feels very much like a sequel to the earlier effort. Asia Argento is a slippery femme fatale in Paris whose involvement with a fading American financier, played by tough guy Michael Madsen, takes a severe turn before she flees to Hong Kong. There, amid glimmers of an old-fashioned, noir-like double cross and an affair with a Chinese businessman, she falls through the looking glass.

The explicit, super-charged sexuality of the scenes between the actors — which climax in a 25-minute sequence shot in one room — pushes both to the hilt, and, as Mr. Assayas noted, recasts the abstractions of “demonlover” in fundamentally human terms. “That movie was filled with emanations of the modern world,” he said. “This uses the same world as a background to characters who are more flesh and blood.”

Mr. Assayas’s desire to make a thriller of sorts that could also allow him to shoot on location in China had always seemed theoretical. He could think of no French actresses able to give him what he would need. And then he met Ms. Argento. “All of a sudden, it made sense out of it all,” he said. “I had no notion who could be believable on both sides: someone having these interiorized emotions and being more underplayed, and then just running around with a gun. She’s pretty unique.”

Ms. Argento, 33, is no stranger to roles that demand intense, raw performances, but her presence in “Boarding Gate” is as cerebral as it is sultry — and tested even her notorious affinity for risk. “The material was not a walk in the park,” she said, in a brief phone call from Rome. “It’s obviously pretty extreme stuff. We did it in a very naïve way without thinking too much about it. Olivier is a great manipulator. He guides you to his universe, but at the same time he is not somebody who explains too much with words. He moves the camera to create dangerous situations. Michael and I were like animals in a cage in that house.”

Mr. Madsen, 49, branded as a heavy since his splash in “Reservoir Dogs,” was enormously grateful for a change of pace. “Who would ever picture me in a Van Heusen shirt?” he asked. “I really dug it. When do I get to kiss a broad in a movie? Hardly ever. The first time I met her she had a can of beer with a straw in it. The second I saw that, I thought, ‘Okay, me and her are going to get along.'”

It’s not too much of a spoiler to mention that Mr. Madsen is dispatched midway through the film, yet it’s the oddly percolating chemistry between the actor and Ms. Argento, measured in the acute sensitivity of the camera’s reflexive movement, that makes everything feel so urgent.

“I think there was something going on between them from the first moment they met,” Mr. Assayas said. “There was some real electricity during the whole scene, every moment, and I used it. The scene was designed very precisely, but they went way beyond what was written.”

Ms. Argento, who also will be seen this year in Catherine Breillat’s “The Last Mistress,” had no regrets, but wasn’t eager to repeat some aspects of the experience. “Shooting in Paris in August,” she said, with a deep sigh, “it is the heat from hell.”