Demonlover

One of the great things about the French is their interest and promotion of THEORY. Sometimes when theory infiltrates Art in too direct a manner the results can be boring or pretentious. In the case of demonlover neither is the case yet the end product doesn't measure up to its individual parts which are brilliant. Suffice it to say this is not a movie for the squeamish or for fans of the character building qualities of a life in business. What the film shows is how much of a construct modern identity is; how much it depends on role, on possessions, on our relationship to the pecking order of whatever tribe we find ourselves in. The film also suggests that the price we pay for hanging on to this fragile identity is nothing less than the seeds of our destruction - a doorway in fact to depression, madness and perversion. Lastly, the film is a devastating look at the way big media corporations hide their involvement in anti-social projects under the veneer of 'just business' or, if they went to the Harvard Business School, 'shareholder value'. Its a rare thing to make an interesting movie with NO sympathetic characters but demonlover achieves this. Many complaints have been launched against the incoherent plot, but the fact is that the plot is not incoherent at all, it just lacks credibility which is a different matter altogether. But no matter: its still an interesting take on a very real set of contemporary circumstances. The performances are also quite compelling which suggests that no matter how dubious a character's morality is, if she's beautiful we (men, that is) will hang on her every word.

I must slam this film if only to reclaim the 90 minutes or so that I cannot ever regain (I ffwd through the last half hour.) The Mrs. and I loved Irma Vep and were intrigued enough by the premise and cast of Demonlover to have a look. This film has an excellent look and feel, so you're taken in at first, until you realize there's no real reason for any of the action and you dislike all the characters, and that's just dislike, because you're not really involved enough to actually HATE them. The music selection is cool, the film even opens with a song by the legendarily obscure German band NEU! The clothes are fab, the whole thing is lit in a cool blue half the time, but the story is a wispy corporate spy drama, with its meat drawn straight from the screenplay of Videodrome. At first we thought we were enjoying ourselves, but ultimately Demonlover is a tired lay.

A propulsive narrative that thrusts the viewer head-first into a maelstrom of international intrigue. An off-handed confluence between corporate greed and dehumanizing sexual imagery that provides a damning indictment of global capitalism. A protagonist struggling with her morality in an amoral world. A punishing but thrilling rock score, courtesy of Sonic Youth. "Demonlover" is perhaps the best thriller I have seen in the past half dozen years.

For the first hour, at least.

After that, the film lapses into incoherence. No, "lapses" is the wrong word -- it purposefully and strenuously burrows ever deeper into incoherence, sequence by sequence, scene by scene. I have never seen a film fall apart so quickly and so completely. Sadder yet, it is the worst sort of failure -- a failure of nerve. Mr. Assayas seems to have lost faith in the intelligence of the audience and ends up indulging the very qualities he was critiquing -- thoughtless spectacle, facile cynicism, and the exploitation and degradation of women. A shame.

Something struck me the other day. A crow was walking close by in the beach pecking at things in the sand, it hopped twice then swooped up to some trees nearby. It was a marvelous show of graceful gliding that had me wondering: what would it be for this to be not a graceful birdplay but your own standard perception?

In the human understanding of space, it crossed a lot of distance with what seemed like considerable effort, but from the bird's effortlessness of movement it must have been as casual as a human gesture of my hand, which means its capacity to do that must come with wholly new experiences of space and time. If I could glide in a second to a tree 10 feet away, the object ceases to be 'far'.

So isn't perception not a fixed property but a relationship to space? And as that relationship, something we can cultivate. In cinematic terms, we can say that the fast moving POV from a car has been opened to us and made available as vision because someone first traveled in a car and that is when it first appeared, though the capacity was there.

Not waxing here. What I mean to say is that I'm drawn to filmmakers who wonder about these things, our placement and intuitions of space, how experience flows from them, and after this film I will always welcome Assayas in my house just as I do Kar Wai and (occasionally) Ferrara and Cronenberg.

We have here the cinematic portrait of a woman in a world in motion, a world of deceit, sex, betrayal. These tropes often packaged in the film noir and sexual thriller narratives are there so that we can have a certain motion pivotal to the thing, visual and narrative. So that we can be hooked into a heightened version of a world we know, one of competiteveness, desires and urges, and dragged along.

It's an interesting story, with rival companies vying for control of the lucrative anime market, and lots of deal-breaking and espionage. You can watch it for just its intricate noir weave of sexual identity; Assayas just loves his fiction too much to use it as a mere hanger for ideas.

What captivates me though is the creation of visual space. Assayas, if you have seen any of his films, is not as accomplished as others, he does not take an eternity to place things in just the right light and symbolic order. He rushes in to create a perceptive experience. Like others of his films, this is messy and disorienting because in his view, we are, our life.

So it matters that Assayas refuses to make a stylish film, to turn any of this into lifestyle ads, what dull Refn would do. It matters that a crucial point in the film of exposed identity happens with murder, unconsciousness and being filmed. The film, in its best spots, is all about this: intense urges in the viewing space between intense hyper- alertness and blurred mind.

I'll keep this with me for just the Tokyo segment. It is hard to be visually uninteresting in Tokyo but watch how marvelous Assayas is; the anchors at this point in the story are uncertain, the what-it-all-means yet, but the rush of visual Tokyo seduces and overwhelms, so when he drags to create visual flows, the anchors snap, it throws us hovering outside the story to find a lonely woman as the perceptive world around her throbs and palpitates.

It's all in that shot in the cab, her tired face framed in the rear view mirror surrounded by unfocused, rushing currents of world.

It's rather sad to watch a talented filmmaker - which French director Olivier Assayaz without a doubt is - taking an original idea and then strangling it with his own hands. Demonlover starts out great - like a 70's spy film, only set in the world of adult Internet sites, which makes the film so much more exciting. And it looks very good, too - as if it takes place in some kind of futuristic sterile world full of bright but cold colours. But in the second half the movie takes a turn towards Lost Highway territory and in the end finds itself exactly where it headed - nowhere. Instead of giving us, viewers, a satisfying resolution of a conflict, the director drags us down the blind alley and shoots us - as well as his own film - in the back. Still, Demonlover has enough to offer to make it worth watching (like a terrific score by Sonic Youth) at least once. It's only the fact that it could be truly great instead of just worth watching, that bothers me