Demonlover
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Like David Cronenberg’s Spider, Olivier Assayas’ small-d demonlover has been taken up and overpraised for its jumble of psychosis, brutal capitalism and the threat of man’s perverted (formerly cinematic) imagination. Both movies, about characters that can’t tell right from wrong, or real from imaginary, turn human spectacle into dank moral confusion. Reviewers were easily impressed–although Spider’s release last spring didn’t appeal to anyone else.
This movie might. It openly engages the dangerous potential of video games–what used to be the cinematic experience now turned lurid and isolating. Resembling a horror-cult critique, it shows how video games, movies and modern technology have warped people’s memories and sense of reality and obliterated their moral limits. Assayas directs a livelier production than Cronenberg; he is genuinely on the cutting edge of technology–through vibrantly composed widescreen imagery (shot by Denis Lenoir) and a dynamic soundtrack that’s always coming at you. It is an ironically cinematic movie to celebrate our current video-mad culture. At the same time, it’s a not-quite-mournful but, in fact, preening death-knell for pop morality.
Assayas voguishly scrutinizes the medium that is destined to overtake cinema. He dramatizes the motivations of those manufacturers and executives now leading the new video market (unaccountably omitting the input of artists and conceptualizers–a convenient leftist conceit). His last movie Les Destinees Sentimentales explored the religious conflicts of a manufacturing family during the Industrial Revolution. Setting demonlover a century later in a fragmented society makes it seem a companion piece–one that can alternately be titled Les Destinees Sans Sentimentalite. But demonlover’s cool, unemotional tone is actually just an updated sentimentality. In keeping with the video era’s taste for novelty, derision and hipness, it doesn’t argue for reform or improvement, but instead presents decadence with cynical conviction.
It begins with a sneak peek at new millennium office politics: Assayas introduces tall, gorgeous, heartless Diane (Connie Nielsen), a video company executive, on a cross-continental flight–somewhere between heaven and hell–from Japan to the chic home office in France. We spy Diane spiking a colleague’s bottled drinking water. Whether poison or a sedative, it shows her desperation–to take a life or take over a current deal. Assayas goes beyond mundane corporate skullduggery to depict mysterious action through sci-fi sleekness and suspense. The aftermath in the airport lobby is even more frightening. By keeping us uncertain of who is victimizing who, Assayas spooks us almost sadistically. That’s the narrative game he establishes. It’s as if these double-crosses were the rule of life happening on a different (perhaps surreal) cyber plane.
Assayas suggests that videogames are just a reflection of these modern retailers’ own treacherous nature. His entire film has the same unnerving effect as those Sega tv-commercials in which a realistically photographed yet fake situation morphs into monstrous cgi. A series of worst-case scenarios, demonlover depicts dystopia’s triumph.
Problem is, like any Prada-wearing hipster, Assayas easily accepts moral defeat. He has become a critical darling because he demonstrates an affectlessness that is now the preferred mode of post-cinematic culture. His 1997 Irma Vep was a joyless appropriation of pop-culture tropes (combining Louis Feuillade’s silent-era serial Les Vampyres with contemporary Hong Kong action totems, and faintly nodding to the French New Wave). He was interested in seeming smart about movies without showing heart–or any sign of pathos, which is now taken to be weak-minded or irrelevant. This antipathetic practice may well derive from conglomerate thinking in which making globally exploitable Entertainment product predominates mere movies. Catering to the amoral video-game market has become detrimental to contemporary film culture. Heroism and integrity are misunderstood or disparaged as hokey relics from the movie past.
In this confusion, one could mistake demonlover–a movie in which no bad deeds go unglamorized–to be an endorsement of its soulless characters. Diane, her junior exec Elise (Chloe Sevigny) or her randy boss Herve (Charles Berling) are all conniving, all villains. Assayas’ lack of sympathy for any of them is evident in each character’s devious games of sexual deception. They are interchangeably diabolical–an exaggeration that serves no purpose other than creating a corkscrew plot that parallels the wormhole nihilism in some video games.
Assayas’ most compelling dramatic twist comes when Diane visits an actual Japanese anime manufacturer. We briefly glimpse the disturbing porno-satanic content of a video titled demonlover. It’s sufficient to convey exactly the type of graphic illustrations that infect the post-cinematic imagination (the same way Diane drugged her co-worker’s water). But just when it seems like he’s getting to the core of the problem–examining the dehumanizing content of pop art–Assayas shifts and spends more time on boardroom scheming and elaborate, rapine revenge subplots (featuring the snarling Gina Gershon). Assayas doesn’t trace what possible personal connection any of these people have to the materiality of their work. (In this way he deflects responsibility from the artist to the producer.) By turning demonlover itself into a simulacra of the product it means to decry, Assayas distorts the actual moral chaos of those who promote violent, pornographic anime and those who participate in its consumption. (The ending is both hokey and hypocritical in its suggestion that human beings are formed only by their media habits.)
The narrative and psychological puzzle of demonlover readily recalls Cronenberg’s Spider. But the murk of Spider and demonlover are unacceptable after the dazzling clarity of such art-conscious films as Chen Kaige’s Together and especially De Palma’s Femme Fatale. Chen and De Palma dealt with art forms (classical music and cinema) long devoted to clarifying the irrational and the sublime in human experience. Those forms might be verging on obsolescence now, but that didn’t stop Chen and De Palma from maintaining their thrill in the face of anime and video games’ rise in popularity. Both directors manipulated time and characters’ consciousness to illustrate their search for moral foundation–De Palma daringly used the thrall of sexual intrigue and movie iconography to subvert pop culture’s pornographic and immoral potential. Unfortunately, no matter how riveting the technique, his proposal was as unhip as celluloid.
Spider and demonlover got critical support because they contrive circumstances in which morality is impossible. They dissuade viewers from following their own need for foundation–and flatter filmmakers for not even trying. Cronenberg’s pessimistic look at dementia welcomed cinema’s decline. Assayas gives undeniable style to disorientation and ugliness–but that should not disguise the fact that demonlover, in the end, is disorienting and ugly.
