Demonlover

Demonlover, by Olivier Assayas, is a dazzling and brilliant film, even if not an entirely successful one. It’s a cyberthriller–with a great score by Sonic Youth–about corporate espionage and Internet porn, with (I am glad to say) mostly unpleasant characters. The plot is initially compelling, but it eventually spins out of control in a way that is, alas, silly rather than delirious. But Demonlover remains an exhilarating experience nonetheless, because of Assayas’ style–the way the film visually and sonically embodies what it is talking about. The camera moves about restlessly, usually in close-up, often blurry. Sometimes you get the impression of fractal replication across all scales, other times of the reduction of the image to its ultimate pixels. This is literally the case when a computer screen fills the film screen, but it’s a visual logic that predominates everywhere in the movie. The world has been transformed into multiple images, all different scales existing simultaneously, constantly throbbing and metamorphosing, never permitting anything like a synoptic (let alone panoptic) overall view. The world has been transformed into a pornographic videogame, and there is no external perspective, you are always in the midst of the action. The elisions and disconnections of the plot, and the way that the characters–mostly women–can never quite be pinned down in terms of motivations–even apart from all the secret alliances and double-crosses–have a long tradition in French art films; but Assayas carries them through in a new way, one that is somehow spacy and visceral at the same time. Demonlover is too much of an art film to have the kind of immediate excitement that recent thrillers borrow from computer gaming; but it works as a dreamlike meta-reflection on the logic that such pop films embody. Despite the fact that Assayas never manages to capture the sort of melancholia and over-the-top kitschy craziness of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or the outrageous meta-leaps and imploded action of comix by Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, or the truly bizarre and twisted visions of, say, Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust, Demonlover is still a powerful exploration of the strange metamorphoses of the image in postmodern global capitalism.

Demonlover, by Olivier Assayas, is a dazzling and brilliant film, even if not an entirely successful one. It’s a cyberthriller–with a great score by Sonic Youth–about corporate espionage and Internet porn, with (I am glad to say) mostly unpleasant characters. The plot is initially compelling, but it eventually spins out of control in a way that is, alas, silly rather than delirious. But Demonlover remains an exhilarating experience nonetheless, because of Assayas’ style–the way the film visually and sonically embodies what it is talking about. The camera moves about restlessly, usually in close-up, often blurry. Sometimes you get the impression of fractal replication across all scales, other times of the reduction of the image to its ultimate pixels. This is literally the case when a computer screen fills the film screen, but it’s a visual logic that predominates everywhere in the movie. The world has been transformed into multiple images, all different scales existing simultaneously, constantly throbbing and metamorphosing, never permitting anything like a synoptic (let alone panoptic) overall view. The world has been transformed into a pornographic videogame, and there is no external perspective, you are always in the midst of the action. The elisions and disconnections of the plot, and the way that the characters–mostly women–can never quite be pinned down in terms of motivations–even apart from all the secret alliances and double-crosses–have a long tradition in French art films; but Assayas carries them through in a new way, one that is somehow spacy and visceral at the same time. Demonlover is too much of an art film to have the kind of immediate excitement that recent thrillers borrow from computer gaming; but it works as a dreamlike meta-reflection on the logic that such pop films embody. Despite the fact that Assayas never manages to capture the sort of melancholia and over-the-top kitschy craziness of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or the outrageous meta-leaps and imploded action of comix by Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, or the truly bizarre and twisted visions of, say, Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust, Demonlover is still a powerful exploration of the strange metamorphoses of the image in postmodern global capitalism.