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FILM COMMENT
Sept/Oct 2003
MOVIE OF THE MOMENT: demonlover
Corporate vampires, bloody catfights,
global cyber spy games-welcome to
Olivier Assayas's desert of the real
by Serge Kaganski
Assayas has been criticized for either denouncing new media too readily or for not viewing this new universe with a sufficiently critical eye. He presents extracts from pornographic anime or scenes from an Internet torture site, but without extending the duration of these shots toward voyeuristic obscenity, proving that he is at once fascinated and disturbed by certain contemporary mutations of images and their commerce. Consequently, he aims neither to denounce nor to blindly endorse porn mangas, sadistic websites, or mercantile cynicism: He confines himself to depicting an existing reality while leaving the spectator free to reflect, and to inventing a form that best suits that reality.
That's why he sets most of his scenes in transitional spaces (airplanes, airports, hotels, cars, offices) with high-tech decors, emphasizing neon lights, corridors, glass surfaces, transparencies, and reflections, and why he juggles countries, languages, and time zones. The film's protagonists no longer have a home country, no longer have families, no longer have ways of distinguishing day from night. They are denied all spatial and temporal anchorage, as if they themselves exist in the digital realm. The cold violence of business, the luxurious spaces within which these people operate, the world of images they deal with, and the deprivation of any reference point seem to cut them off completely from reality, emptying them of their emotions and their humanity. They are pale, incapable of feeling or expressing feelings, ready to kill one another (metaphorically or literally). They are modern vampires, maneuvering in a world of illusions, reflections, and trompe-l'oeil effects. Their translucent offices belie their opaque transactions and motivations. Vampires infecting one another, they have themselves been vampirized by the images of sex that they sell and consume. The more omnipresent sex is, the more obsessional and violent in visual form, the less these characters make love; their libidos have been drained.
As cold and stylized as a fashion magazine, Assayas's mise-en-scène harmonizes with his subject: The fluidity of his camera movements, the precise composition of his frames, the cold, bluish tint of his lighting, and the score by Sonic Youth (an integral part of the film's mise-en- scène, as well and its narrativity, soundscape, and interconnectedness) work together to express the cold, repressed violence of our contemporary universe, camouflaged by a veneer of sophisticated civilization. It may perhaps be a fact of modern sociology that women occupy a preponderant position in this world without pity, from the top (the power elite) to the bottom (sex slaves). But it's even more certainly a sign of Assayas's dark desire: One feels strongly that, in this icy choreography of predators and prey, the director finds the most intense pleasure in filming the fights between women, whether they are physical or rhetorical, expressed or repressed.
At once illness and antidote, wound and knife, chilling and fascinating-in short, demonic and loving-demonlover is a beautiful and disturbing contemporary filmic object, concentrating within itself most of Assayas's obsessions (Feuillade, Bergman, Kenneth Anger, women, New York rock music) and in which the filmmaker seems to say to us, "To denounce monstrosity is only a form of hypocrisy, because we are all fascinated by the monstrous and distressing. We are all responsible for the times we live in, for better and for worse." -Serge Kaganski
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© 2003 by Serge Kaganski
