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Demonlover

2002, Movie, NR, 129 mins

Demonlover: Review

DEMONLOVER
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Beware angular beauties stalking the business-class sections of international flights! Sex, money, power and corruption converge in Olivier Assayas's glossy meditation on the dangerous allure of surfaces and the ugliness that lies beneath, which starts out a straightforward tale of industrial espionage and twists itself into a knot of existential angst so tight it makes your head hurt. And that is surely precisely the point. Ambitious, Paris-based Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen), executive assistant to multinational tycoon Henri-Pierre Volf (Jean-Baptise Malartre), will do anything to climb the ladder of corporate success, including drug her colleague, Karen (Dominique Reymond), so she'll be easy prey for kidnappers who want the very important papers in her briefcase. With Karen in the hospital, Diane inherits her resentful secretary, Elise (Chloe Sevigny), and her prize project. Volk sends Diane to Japan to broker the purchase of a controlling interest in TokyoAnime, a company that produces pornographic cartoons and is developing a new 3-D animation software that will revolutionize the genre. While Diane and fellow executive Herve Le Millinec (Charles Berling) are in Tokyo, Volk stays in Paris to hammer out a related deal with the owners of demonlover, an American website poised to corner the market in smutty anime. What Volk doesn't know is that Diane is actually a corporate spy for demonlover's rival, Mangatronix, and will go to any extreme to disrupt the negotiations on her secret employers' behalf. What Volk does know is that the racy but ostensibly law-abiding demonlover is associated with a sub rosa interactive website called Hellfire Club, which allows users to torture real women online. Diane finds herself adrift in a sea of deceit, tormented by anonymous notes that suggest someone knows what she did to Karen, pursued by the amorous Herve, whose motives are unnervingly ambiguous, and undermined by Elise, to whom there's more — much more — than meets the eye. As Diane loses control, the story spirals into incomprehensibility and there's no longer any way to tell what's really happening and what's a paranoid fantasy. Assayas weaves strands of films as diverse as David Cronenberg's spookily prescient VIDEODROME (1983) and the sleazy FEARDOTCOM (2002) into his high-gloss anti-technothriller, which must be the coldest film about the intersection of technology and espionage since Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION (1974). The harder you try to follow the narrative the more frustrating the film becomes, but its sleekly menacing images work their way into your brain like slivers of dry ice. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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