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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Olivier Assayas' unclassifiable porn-capitalism thriller is a theory-addled nightmare -- but it's also a profound and troubling movie about contemporary life.
Sep 19, 2003 | Can a movie seem like a disaster and still convince you you're seeing something bold and new? Olivier Assayas' unclassifiable "demonlover" (calling it a "cyberthriller" reeks of a determination to shoehorn it into a category in which it will not fit) is a mixture of folly and brilliance, often at the same time. The movie feels like a shambles, and yet it's a stunning example of a director in complete control of his material. Distilled to their essence, the ideas Assayas is putting forth here seem silly and even alarmist. At times, "demonlover" plays like the most paranoid fantasies of anti-globalization and anti-porn activists. But Assayas has locked on to some ugly truths about corporate and private life and about our relation to technology right now, and what he's saying is no more dismissible because it's obvious.
So much twaddle is written about the "ideas" in movies and books that we fail to recognize that sometimes the force with which something is expressed counts for as much as -- or more than -- its content. "Demonlover" is cold and feverish, sadistic and appalled by the sadism it shows us, narratively opaque and thematically lucid. It's a consistently exciting piece of moviemaking, but it's not a pleasant experience; it's one of the few recent movies that have the power to leave you genuinely shaken up.
That may sound like fence straddling, but the truth is that neither the praise nor the derision that "demonlover" inspires has grasped its contradictions. The film got a murderous reception at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival (it has since been cut by 12 minutes) and then from French critics, and it bombed when it was released in that country. Now the movie's American supporters seem to be gearing up for its release here, perhaps relishing a chance to give it back to their Gallic counterparts who have always delighted in ridiculing Americans for the homegrown treasures we have trashed.
The emerging critical line on "demonlover" seems to be that all the critics who have complained about the incoherence of the movie's storyline have missed the point. Assayas, his supporters argue, is attempting to capture the nonlinear experience of the Internet or of moviewatching in the era of DVDs, when you can look at parts of a movie in any order you wish. Assayas has spouted his fair share of nonsense seconding that opinion. In interviews like the one in Cinema Scope, reprinted in the movie's production notes, Assayas says of the film's detractors that what they call coherence is actually "some kind of conventional framework to express the conventional emotions of supposedly nonconventional characters who actually end up being more conventional than conventional."
"Demonlover"
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas
Starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Gina Gershon
He adds, "People have this very stiff notion of what cinema is and what cinema should be, and then try to apply rules that are old rules, rules from another time ... Then you have to shake up the whole thing, and believe that you can create new connections, try in your own modest way to open new doors for what cinema can be." He says that the movie's characters start out "in a classic genre situation" but end up "on their own ... Instead of being driven by the manipulative conventions of safe storytelling, they are manipulated by their own subconscious, by their own inner logic, or absence of logic."
Who can blame a talented young filmmaker (and Assayas is the most talented French filmmaker of his generation) for not wanting to make the same genre movie that's already been made a thousand times? Still, this is nonsense. Assayas' characters are not "on their own." Their choices and their fate have not been decided by the whims of a million Web surfers or DVD viewers. They have been decided by Assayas himself. And if he claims that psychology and motivation are nothing more than tyrannies of outmoded storytelling, then he is not commenting on the nonlinear experience of narrative in new technology but merely replicating it. Most of the plots of the big Hollywood blockbusters don't make any sense, and nobody is going to give them any credit for pioneering daring new avenues of cinema. It's not timidity that angers audiences or critics when they play by the rules a filmmaker sets up (for its first hour, "demonlover" has a meticulously constructed narrative) and then, without being prepared for a switch, find that the director has changed the rules on them in the middle of the game.
If there's any storytelling model for "demonlover," it may be Howard Hawks' film of "The Big Sleep," whose insanely labyrinthine plot becomes less important than the feeling of a miasma of corruption in which connections are too dense and deep to ever be fully understood. "demonlover" zooms willfully off the narrative rails about halfway through, and trying to make sense of the plot later only yields explanations that cancel each other out. Yet I'm not sure the movie would be as powerful if it didn't take that leap into incoherence.
To borrow one of those classic storytelling descriptions Assayas disdains, nothing and no one are as they seem. The film is about two companies battling for the distribution rights of a Japanese anime production house that's about to revolutionize the market with the introduction of 3-D porn. Diane (Connie Nielsen) represents an international acquisitions firm working to get those rights and sell them to an American company called Demonlover. But she's actually a spy for Demonlover's main competitor, Mangatronics, and any questions about how far she'll go are answered in the opening scene, when she arranges to take over from Karen (Dominique Reymond), the woman handling the negotiations, by injecting Haldol into Karen's Evian and having her kidnapped by two thugs who leave her in the trunk of her car.
