Demonlover

(2002) dir. Olivier Assayas
viewed: 04/06/08

I had rented this movie a few years back and never got around to seeing it.  Director Olivier Assayas came to my attention back in 1996 with his film Irma Vep, an unusual self-reflexive film about the re-making of Louis Feuillade’s silent serial Les Vampires (1915) with Maggie Cheung running around the rooftops of Paris in a catsuit (Me-yow!).  And Assayas has a new film that just came out that I am interested in called Boarding Gate (2007).  This was the second of four movies that I rented, hoping to gorge myself on a variety of sci fi.

This film is not science fiction.  It’s a thriller, about corporate espionage, Japanese Anime, the internet and sex slavery.  The film starts out in the coporate arena, with the gorgeous Connie Nielsen drugging a co-worker and initiating her kidnap and the theft of corporate secrets.  Even with this event, Demonlover begins in the more traditional world of corporate battles, boardrooms, pampered trips to Japan, and then begins a quick descent into the madness and extremity of murder, sex slavery, and bondage.

It’s hard to say exactly what Assayas is getting at.  His gaze at sexualized anime is one of titilation but also criticism.  The naked girls who have no pubic hair getting raped by monsters and mayhem, what does it signify?  And then, the American business side, who seems tied in with everyone in the deepest of depths (there are double crossers and double agents if you will), there is the site itself “demonlover.com” in which, with serious security, a user can virtually torture a real person (kind of like that weird site a few years ago where you could virtually “hunt” with a real gun on the other end).

The commentary seems more clear at the end, when a teenage American boy, with his father’s credit card in hand, is the one coming up with X-men-inspired tortures for the faceless victim.  The separation of the real and the unreal, or the connection between the sexualized fantasies and the fictions, the lies…

Uh, I don’t know.  It’s interesting for the most part.  Toward the end, I was thinking that David Lynch could handle this material much better.  Maybe he has.  The message here is muddled.  Or maybe just muddy.  Or perhaps that is Assayas’s comment on the nature of morality, that it is muddled and muddy.  Who knows?