Demonlover

DEMONLOVER   **

Olivier Assayas

2002

IDEA:  A female lead executive at a software firm becomes embroiled in a corporate battle for control over an online pornography company.

BLURB:  As a representation of the perception-deforming effects of our hyper-mediated digital landscape, Demonlover is pretty compelling. Assayas, cinematographer Denis Lenoir, and editor Luc Barnier cogently embed these effects in the film’s form, from the rhyming of whooshing bokeh streetlights with closeups of flashing pixels and scrolling web pages to the elliptical cuts and ambiguous spatial relations that evoke the flattened temporality of the Internet. As the film grows increasingly fractured in its second half, the dissociation and derealization experienced by Connie Nielsen’s Diane unnervingly become our own. Demonlover is also successful, albeit in a totally didactic and mostly schematic way, in depicting the systematic exploitation – particularly the objectification of women – that fuels our global-capitalist image economy. Yet the film’s cynicism is trite and predetermined, inflected by a reactionary skein of technophobia and misogyny. The female characters in the film exist purely as manifestations of patriarchal fantasy, ruthlessly power-hungry corporate ice queens and evil lesbians who participate in their own oppression. Assayas wants to expose their dehumanization by the culture industry, but he ends up making them just further images to manipulate on a screen. Demonlover ends with a groaningly obvious “twist” of fate that could have arrived over an hour earlier with no ground lost, its grim irony as inevitable as the voracious march of capitalism.