Demonlover

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

Admittedly, DEMONLOVER makes a sharp left narrative turn at the halfway point that's going to confound viewers who are intrigued by the straightforward (and extremely absorbing) high-stakes opening. But that's no reason to dismiss the many, many things that writer/director Olivier Assayas gets absolutely right. In the end, DEMONLOVER is a fascinating mirror-world reflection (as William Gibson would call it) of where our global society might be just five minutes from now: the fittest who survive will be multilingual, career-consumed and ridiculously chic, but also soulless, as if missing the gene that supplies a sense of loyalty and ethics. The movie is a cautionary, though entirely plausible, tale of humans debased by their own lust for ungoverned capitalism. Every line of dialogue is about the business merger at hand; in the rare instances where feelings are discussed, they're usually about how *work* affects those emotions. The big wink here is that the characters don't even discuss business honestly, because each has duplicitous motives.

Technically, DEMONLOVER is a feast. Denis Lenoir's widescreen photography constantly dazzles -- many of the tracking shots are sustained in close-up (creating paranoia), and the color spectrum appears as if filtered through corporate fluorescence. (The neon-drenched Tokyo sequence is particularly hypnotic.) Jump cuts keep the narrative one step ahead of the audience. Sonic Youth's atonal guitar score creates the same mutant environment that Howard Shore pulled off in CRASH. Most significantly, Connie Nielsen's face (and hair and wardrobe) mesmerizes more than any CGI I've ever seen. Considering the labyrinthine motives of her character, Nielsen's exquisite subtlety may be lost on first-time viewers; on second look, her emotionless gaze speaks volumes.

Audiences (and critics) have unanimously attacked the `problematic' second half as an example of directorial self-indulgence. While I agree that it's not as satisfying as the first half, I don't think it's a total crash-and-burn (pardon the pun). Clearly, the ending is open to thematic interpretation, but I think Assayas is just saying that if our species isn't more careful, we'll end up like one-dimensional characters in a video game of our own devising - sure, winner takes all, but the rest of us suffer enormously.

Narrative ambiguity aside, DEMONLOVER is the great Hitchcockian/Cronenbergian espionage fantasia I've been waiting for. It makes sense that it would come from Europe, since Hollywood forgot long ago how to make their assembly-line genre exercises intellectually stimulating. (Like the animé porn within the story, Hollywood movies today represent no more than a calculated corporate commodity.) More than any other film from the last 2½ years, DEMONLOVER seems a product of the post-9/11 world - a not-so-distant future where overwhelming paranoia goads us to preemptively eliminate any form of potential competition before it can do the same to us. And how in doing so, we devour our own tail.

I expect this movie's reputation will grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years.

Demonlover is in many ways an interesting movie. The French critics didn't like it, which is a reason on itself to go to see it (the French tend to praise their own stuff most of the time). So, that's what I did. And it leaves you unsettled just like Cronenberg's Crash. Same industrial 'cool' spaces, same underacted performances (Nielsen is brilliant) and all in all a plot that goes off track near the end. When you leave the theatre, you're not sure whether you've seen a good movie or not. So what is it about? Espionage, 3D Manga porn, control & controlled, torture (physically and mentally) and betrayal. Interesting stuff that keeps you hooked on the screen for the first 1,5 hour, but director Assayas overkills the last half hour by adding unnecessary plot twists, unexplained events and an ending that kinda leads to nowhere. Still, the stunning visuals and the Sonic Youth score make it all worth the visit. Also check out Assayas' Irma Vep.

Connie Nielsen is an industrial spy, infiltrated in big international corporation searching for secret information and trying to sabotage their last project DEMONLOVER.

DEMONLOVER is the name of a web site/3D porn anime/game. Well it is never too clear what exactly it is but you have a long glimpse at what it is inside (basically violent and highly sexual anime and 3D computer generated images).

However, been an industrial spy is not as easy as it may seem, particularly when three or four corporations are competing and very unscrupulous higher minds are manipulating the game and players. Almost everybody that has or had some relation with a major corporation, knows how greed, corruption and desire for power move everything inside, so nobody will deem unrealistic when people have to die to achieve the company business plan.

During the whole setup and presentation DEMONLOVER shines as the best real world spy movie seen lately, but sadly, the second half lose strength and the story get nowhere. Some scenes and storylines have not continuity (like a piece is cut or missing during editing) and the end is disappointing and unnecessary.

The movie is however worth watching. The acting is very good and for a French movie, most actors are well known in America like Connie Nielsen or Chloe Sevigny. The music score is excellent as most technical aspects and international locations (the movie was shot in France, USA, Japan and Mexico). The story is quite original and the suspense carries you until the end. It could easily pass as a decent thriller (albeit the superb it started as).

It is worth mentioning, that some things could endanger it commercial success. There are not good guys; just bad or worse and the main characters are women (men characters are accessories here). A few people could get upset for some porn (anime and human) showed during the film, but because that part of the story occurs in Japan, the gross scenes are digitally shadowed.

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.