demonlover

Dir: Olivier Assayas
2002
Certainly one of the strangest films I’ve seen this year, I caught this in Pasadena at the Laemmle, sure that it will never come to Santa Barbara. What starts out as a chilly tale of big business quickly turns into something broader in scheme. This isn’t a film about pawns caught in capitalism’s game, this film is capitalism itself. It’s a relentless blurring of identity until characters get reduced to units to be fucked or killed. Connie Nielson plays Diane, who at the beginning of the film, drugs her coworker, an event that allows her to take her place in a multinational corporation that is shuttling back and forth between Tokyo and Paris to buy shares in an anime company specializing in porn cartoons and 3-D CG porn. There’s Hervé (Charles Berling), who Diane may be involved with, and a subordinate, Elise (Chloe Sevigny), who hates her guts. Then there’s the American representatives, one of whom is Gina Gershon. There’s a secret website called “The Hellfire Club” that offers live snuff feeds for a price.
About halfway through I kind of gave up on the plot and, like giving up on trying to pick out notes and melody in a wash of feedback, just let the movie roll over me. (Soundtrack is by Sonic Youth, and I’m glad I saw this in the theater, as the effective sound levels are something that would get me evicted.)
The film is intentionally hard to listen to, hard to watch, and hard to follow. Here and there you start to pick up on clues that Assayas has left. Why so many shots of credit card machines? Why a scene similar to the hotel scene in Assayas’ own “Irma Vep”–and why does Diane’s costume in that scene return as a PVC Emma Peel suit? (Emma Peel–Avengers…wasn’t one of the episodes in which she nearly got tortured to death called the Hellfire Club? And wasn’t the Hellfire Club a front for the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the XMen comic book…and didn’t Storm get captured by them? And doesn’t a character at the end of the movie request a victim dress up like Storm? And by making all these connections, does that make me closer to an understanding, or does that make me a sad, sad man?)
Nobody has any background or connection to anybody or anything. Though the movie teems with lascivious sex, there’s barely any to be had, and nothing to come of it in terms of humanity.
“demonlover” alludes to the website, but also to the multi-phallused and tentacled demons of Japanese porn anime, able to send out their tendrils to fill every orifice of their young nubile victims. Tattoo “21st Century Capitalism” across the demon’s chest and you have a rough and ready metaphor of the film.
Following up, there’s a short essay over at The Film Journal on the film that brings up an interesting point regarding video games and the scene in which Nielson fights Gershon (a “level boss” in videogame terms). That the film is one big video game is suggested, and reminded me of my friend’s worry that in fact The Matrix Revolutions will end with this po-mo joke (they wouldn’t be so blatant or so bold, methinks, but the trailer for that film looks like the makers are cashing in their chips for a full-on Death Star like battle to the death).
In a later conversation with Jon, I added that those critics who think the whole thing is a videogame fall into the same apathetic trap as the teenager at the end–that nobody is worth caring about because they’re on the computer screen.