Tools
dir. Olivier Assayas
Plays Fri-Thurs Oct 3-9 at the Varsity.
Demonlover opens with a drugging and ends with torture. The drugging comes courtesy of a spiked Evian; the torture, a car battery and a metal bed frame. In between these cheery bookends there is murder, kidnapping, porn, more murder, more kidnapping, more porn, and a dash of rape. All of which can mean only one thing: C'est Français.
Stranger Personals
Specifically, it is a work from French director Olivier Assayas, whose Irma Vep starred a PVC-clad Maggie Cheung, and which remains as one of my all-time favorite fits of filmmaking madness--a strange, inspired piece of work that explored obsession, genius, and the possible demise of French cinema. This time around, Assayas has turned his sights from the French film industry to the mangled world of Internet porn, and the results are two-thirds brilliant, one-third travesty; like David Lynch's Lost Highway it begins splendidly, but is eventually overcome by unnecessary nonsense. This doesn't make for a bad picture, just a thoroughly confusing (and possibly confused) one.
The story is a wee bit complicated: A French conglomerate known as the VolfGroup is negotiating the acquisition of a Japanese animation house called TokyoAnimé, whose revolutionary 3-D porn is set to alter spanking habits worldwide. VolfGroup has competition, however, in the form of Magnatronics, another conglomerate whose continued existence relies on keeping TokyoAnimé out of VolfGroup's greedy hands.
Enter Diane (Connie Nielson), a morally vacant employee of Magnatronics who has wormed her way into VolfGroup's upper offices. Cold and stylish, Diane's heart appears to have been replaced by her Prada wardrobe, and after she performs the aforementioned drugging (and then kidnapping) of one of her superiors, she is handed the TokyoAnimé discussions--just the position she needs to give TokyoAnimé to Magnatronics. But it's not so easy; someone is onto Diane's shenanigans. Her chief suspects are Elise (Chloë Sevigny), a company secretary, and Hervé (Charles Berling), a fellow executive. Elise openly despises Diane; Hervé openly wants her in bed. But both, it appears, are not what they seem.
At this point, Demonlover has been set up as a corporate thriller, a nutshell it resides in for the bulk of its running time. But as negotiations between VolfGroup and TokyoAnimé continue, and as an executive (Gina Gershon) for an American porn company arrives, Assayas' film begins to crumble. Double-crosses and mischief pile up, and the moment Diane is forced to commit murder, the film makes a key turn. And that turn is toward a muddled mess, for as the film stumbles toward its ending, Assayas swiftly transforms Demonlover from a sturdy thriller into what appears to be a clumsy attempt to capture the essence of the Internet on screen. Gaping holes suddenly appear in the narrative (404 File Not Found), with Diane's existence taking a deadly (and somewhat absurd) plunge--traveling from Paris to rural Texas to, eventually, a digital image on a suburban American teen's bedroom com- puter, all leading up to a scenario where Diane finds herself in the middle of the desert, wandering by a burning car and dressed as The Avengers' Emma Peel. In other words, things fall apart.
Or do they? What I'm about to state is a complete cop-out, but here's the thing: A full week after watching Demonlover I still don't know how I feel about it. Part of me greatly appreciates it; part of me despises it. And based on the film's general reception, I'm not alone. Many critics, such as those who first watched it during its disastrous premiere at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, find it to be an incoherent, pretentious blunder. Others, such as writers for Film Comment (of course), believe it's an inspired work that utilizes, to quote Serge Kaganski's essay on the film, "a style that is at once a product, a reflection, and a critique of the epoch rather than a mise-en-scene that simply assembles a series of lectures on the matter at hand." Huh? Exactly the point--there are no clear answers to be found in Assayas' film, and in truth both of the above viewpoints are probably correct; many will hate it, others will find (or convince themselves to find) that it is brilliant--and doesn't that alone make it a successful venture?
Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing's for sure: I am more than willing to watch it again to try and find out.
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