Hey folks, Harry here with Mr Beaks and his look at DEMONLOVER, a film I saw around a year ago in Sitges, that I find fascinating, intriguing, mysteriously erotic... Connie Nielsen is like a composed elegant smart version of Kate Beckinsale, and she even looks better in patent leather (wait till you see) and she gets out. Very cool....
demonlover (w. & d. Olivier Assayas)
Olivier Assayas’s demonlover takes place in the ethical swampland of multi-national conglomerates, merged into each other several times over until singular corporate mission statements are little more than a formality, while morality takes a cum stained back seat to market share, diversification and profit. What this means to the average, halfway decent individual is best left unpondered lest one miss their opportunity to make hay in this capitalist Wild West. This is the path chosen by Diane (Connie Nielsen), who is introduced in the opening ten minutes drugging a colleague so that a briefcase full of important files, handcuffed to her wrist for paranoid safe keeping, can be taken from her. Diane is truly a tangle of twisted allegiances; though serving as the assistant to the eponymous CEO of VolfGroup, a reasonably desirable position, she’s also being paid off by the desperate Magnatronics company to assist them in garnering the rights to the pornographic product of TokyoAnime, a recent VolfGroup acquisition. Magnatronics prime concern is their stronger competitor, Demonlover, which is perhaps a deal away from dominating the online pornographic market.
What’s most peculiar about demonlover, though certainly not to its detriment, as it is a consistently involving film with only a few minor lulls in its pacing, is that I think *I’m* more interested in the themes and issues being investigated by Assayas than he is. Ultimately, as was the case with his masterpiece, IRMA VEP (1996), this is really cinema for cinema’s sake, and, as such, it’s inspiring stuff. A former writer for CAHIERS DU CINEMA, and, in the pages of FILM COMMENT, a recently professed fan of THE CANNONBALL RUN, there’s little doubting Assayas’s love for the ineffably transcendent experience of watching a film. Firing off of this enthusiasm, he’s sought to make demonlover a uniquely seductive picture by imbuing this normally insistent genre with a dreamlike quality, as if we’re watching everything from a stoned distance.
How else to account for the almost indifferent structuring of the narrative, where plot points glide by so casually, its as if Assayas, who also wrote the screenplay, wants us not to notice? Truth be told, this made for a genuinely frustrating first viewing of the film, where I got so caught up in the societal implications of the story that, when I couldn’t get it all to add up, I was ready to dismiss it as an interesting failure. But the film stayed with me, which told me that I was connecting with something in its wild, cacophonous disorder, and should probably give it a second chance. Sometimes, a mess of drama can be invigorating in its own inexplicable right (e.g. one of my favorite plays is John Guare’s LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY, which is a proud, limping spectacle of torn narrative tissue, and all the more beautiful for it), but there’s got to be some form of compelling human behavior onscreen to make it palatable. demonlover has this in the compromised embodiment of VolfGroup’s every employee, but many of them, including Charles Berling’s lecherous Herve, are too content in their corruption; they ceased being human ages ago. Diane, then, for all her bottomless duplicity, makes for the best protagonist because she seems to be the only person who, through her guilt ridden body language, acknowledges her own venality. Though she can be the smoothest liar in the room in one-on-one business dealings, or at the negotiating table, Diane’s painfully self-aware scurrying through the chaos of the trading room at VolfGroup, shoulders tensed and panicked gaze avoiding every chance of eye contact, belies her soullessly calculating façade. And as we watch her plunge irrevocably into the morass of corporate skullduggery, this subtly expressed lack of resolve hangs over her rapid ascent like the sword of Damocles.
Diane’s get-ahead-at-all-costs behavior finally comes to a head when she dons a cat suit (shades of Maggie Cheung in IRMA VEP), and attempts a B&E to steal important files from one of Demonlover’s chief negotiators, Elaine (Gina Gershon). It winds up being one criminal act too many, resulting in confrontation between the two women that subverts the traditionally titillating spectacle of the catfight by turning it into a bloody, despairing death struggle. Eventually, Elaine overcomes her would-be assailant, marking the beginning of Diane’s descent. Her ties to Magnatronics exposed, Diane is officially without leverage, but rather than sweep this pawn off the table, the company actively pursues her degradation. By the time she’s bound-and-gagged as a sex slave for an underground torture website called “The Hellfire Club”, we’re disturbed, but not shocked; after all, it’s essentially the logical destination to which she’s been headed since she began her dignity-shedding striptease in the film’s opening moments.
demonlover has been described by critics as an essay on the oxymoron of corporate ethics juxtaposed against the lurid porn industry; a damning disquisition on the voluntary dehumanization of the success obsessed. But Assayas’s thesis isn’t so much stated as artfully implied. This is much more a tone poem in the mold of Michael Mann’s underappreciated ALI; a combining of disparate elements that inform each other in sometimes obvious, but sometimes surprising ways. And while these ideas aren’t always cleanly articulated, they’re spoken with such a rich visual vocabulary that it doesn’t really matter. This is an immersive cinematic experience, replete with a hypnotic score from Sonic Youth that is somewhat similar to Kevin Shields’s miraculous work in LOST IN TRANSLATION. In the hands of a propagandist like Oliver Stone, this film would be shouted at you, but Assayas takes a counterintuitive approach. He soothes when the material begs for righteous indignation, and repulses when other filmmakers might arouse (given the decidedly sexy cast, it’s remarkable that, save for the pleasant sight of Chloe Sevigny playing videogames in the nude, there’s not a single moment of enticing eroticism in the entire movie). The result is something wholly original, and, happily, more fascinating than frustrating. Though still too long at a full two hours (the film was cut down by twelve minutes after its premiere at Cannes in 2002), the flaws ultimately feel as if they’re necessary tangents enabling the film’s frequent, intoxicating greatness.
Messy as it is, Assayas has, with demonlover, reaffirmed his position as one of the most inventive directors working today.
demonlover opens this Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
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