Ray Pride

Francois Truffaut famously observed that anyone making an accurate antiwar movie would also be making a pro-war movie as well.

With the painfully intelligent "demonlover," Olivier Assayas fashions a counter-"Matrix" of paranoia and dread, while tempting the boundaries of subversive or offensive imagery. He takes as his great subject the manipulation and saturation of images in the contemporary world, mostly commercialized in one form or another. Can a film that broaches the limits of pornography avoid the taint of becoming pornographic itself? The director of "Late August, Early September" and "Les Destinees" struggles to decipher the DNA of our twenty-first century psyches. Seeing it a second time recently, I took a friend who found it to be the most "contemptible" film she'd ever seen, yet we talked about it for hours afterward. It is provocative, and the sort of ambitious, confounding, disturbing, often misguided object that could only be made by a master director who cares about the present of our global society and of movies as well.

After seeing the movie in Vancouver last fall, I figured it wouldn't get U.S. distribution. (It was denounced by most critics at Cannes and had been turned down by the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.) "demonlover" is just that disturbing, despite its cool, sleek surfaces and assured craftsmanship. As much as any French cineaste, Assayas can explicate, footnote and free-associate as readily as he can make a beautiful composition. Talking on any topic to Assayas is a drenching experience, and the welter of ideas he brings to his movie and to conversation is daunting. Aside from references to filmmakers he was influenced by--Egoyan, the Cronenberg of "Videodrome," the Pasolini of "Salo," David Lynch's Mobius-strip-like "Lost Highway"--Assayas asserted that he wanted "demonlover" to approximate the disorienting experience of watching the world with a remote control in hand, or through the randomness that is the ideal behind the concept of hypertext and hyperlinks. Of the film's title, Assayas says that it's "one of those abstract words you find on the Internet, a combination of words you might throw into a search engine. You use it without thinking about it. You don't notice anything special about it. It's exactly what the devil is about: making you forget about its presence."

The movie begins quickly, a few lovely titles with a burst of music by Sonic Youth. We're in the midst of a corporate intrigue. Diane (Connie Nielsen) and several coworkers, including Herve (Charles Berling) are returning from making a deal in another country. Diane drugs one of her coworkers, whose work is stolen and who is then shoved into the trunk of her own car. Are we in an early 1970s Alan Pakula paranoia picture? We learn about Diane's conflicts with other coworkers, including Elise (Chloe Sevigny), an assistant with aspirations to match Diane's. A malign frostiness chills most scenes. Control-freak agendas clash. Conspiracies unravel, conspirators regroup.

The style of the movie shifts abruptly every ten minutes or so, as we learn more about the deal everyone's fixed on, which is about Internet pornography involving sadism and purported "snuff" films. They travel the globe, these corporate minions, back-stabbing, second-guessing, staying drunk in the sort of luxe hotels of a minimalism that can be afforded only by the very wealthy and very powerful. But how do they use they power? By balancing on the shifting sands of loyalty, perceived loyalty, treachery and perceived treachery. It's an uncommonly supple hall-of-mirrors. But in all its permutations, you have to wonder, is it punishingly good about terrible subjects, or merely punishing? Assayas has said, "I don't accept the notion that I'm part of an art-cinema generation that is very happy with agreeing that whatever is worthy in cinema today will be made for a small elite audience, an educated bourgeoisie."

Assayas wants to tinker with many genres and expectations, all in a single film. (Don't we all carry myriad conflicts and fantasies and received storytelling vocabularies in our heads already?) Games play out within games, and at times, it seems Diane's life--we learn that this is an assumed name, but never learn her true name--is "My Life As A First Person Shooter" game. She stumbles from complication to complication, reactive at first, but then leaping into the worst possible situations--sexual, murderous, submissive.

Amid the Japanese anime-porn, videogames, hotel-room porn, the depiction of bondage and torture websites (particularly one called hellfire.com), espionage, burglary and eventual murder, Diane seems more and more like a figure in a video game, one that is being manipulated by a cruel boy behind a joystick more interested in splatter and perversion than in making it through the maze of the machine-narrative. (In a strange, David Lynch-like detour near the end of the movie, Diane and Elise escape to Mexico, where more mayhem ensues after a scene of Sevigny, nude, on her belly, kicking her feet in the air while she plays a video game.)

Even when Assayas has made period work, like the turn-of-the-last-century "Les Destinees," released in the U.S. last year, it seems modern. The camera movements, editing choices and behavioral observations in that movie seemed as much of the present moment as his work in "Irma Vep" and "Late August..."

Still, "No one sees anything. Ever. They watch but they don't understand," one of the characters hypothesizes. I'm curious to see what others will understand differently and discuss about this gorgeous, glittering mess. (Particularly those unfortunate enough to see it on a date.)

"demonlover" opens Friday at the Landmark Century. An intense, epic interview with Assayas by Canadian writer Mark Peranson appears at www.cinema-scope.com .

(2003-09-17)

Also by Ray Pride

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With "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," the grown-up Rodriguez lovingly embellished the mythology he forged in the no-budget "El Mariachi," a $7,000 super-8 movie that cost $1 million to blow up to 35mm for theaters
(2003-09-10)

Tuning into Tokyo
A movie like this resists explanation, since its magical, melancholy moods are a triumph of image, music and performance, with plot and suspense a distant, superfluous concern
(2003-09-10)

Every time I see you falling
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Short Runs
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Tip of the Week
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Requiem for a teen
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Short Runs
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Chicago Underground Film Festival
(2003-08-27)

Tip of the Week
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Alienation
(2003-08-20)

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