| A business executive involved in a corporate espionage scheme to control the high-stakes world of Internet pornography becomes embroiled in a complex game of cat-and-mouse, in which everyone involved may be both predator and prey at any given moment.
The chilling concept behind French director Olivier Assayas’s suspense thriller Demonlover (France, 2002) is sound, even if the film’s elliptical narrative structure at times makes it nigh impossible to follow what’s going on or who’s double-crossing whom. Yet this confusion is the byproduct of the idea that duplicity, amorality and self-interest are the qualities most richly rewarded in business, an idea that propels the film to some rather disturbing conclusions about human nature and contemporary society. If the measure of a film is in direct proportion to the anxiety it provokes in its audience, then Demonlover deserves a great deal more esteem than it has already received.
Part of what makes the film so unsettling is that it aligns our point of view early on with that of Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen), a character who gives new dimensions to the archetype of the anti-heroic femme fatale. In her day job, Diane works for a French acquisitions firm called Volf, which is in negotiations with Tokyo Anime to gain control of 75 per cent of the world’s Internet pornography market. Not surprisingly, it turns out that Diane is a cutthroat operator, willing to switch her allegiances whenever it suits her interests to do so. But after she’s caught selling company secrets to Tokyo Anime’s primary competitor Mangatronics, Diane becomes bound up in a trap that would appear to be of her own ill-considered design.
Of course, the key to understanding Demonlover is to recognize that no individual is ever truly in control, and this is where the film deviates substantially from most other espionage thrillers. There is no criminal mastermind, no over-arching conspiracy against the protagonist, merely a number of other players who are all motivated by their own equally justifiable self-interests. These include not only Diane’s boss Volf (Jean-Baptiste Malartre), but also her primary rival Karen (Dominique Reymond), her conniving assistant Elise (Chloë Sevigny), her womanizing co-worker Hervé (Charles Berling) and their obnoxious American client Elaine (Gina Gershon).
Nothing said by any of them should ever be taken at face value, even if that means watching the film at least twice to grasp the depth of ambiguity in the script. These characters are motivated not by right and wrong, but rather by what is profitable within the rather elastic bounds of the law. Even when negotiations threaten to break down over the content of an interactive torture website called Hellfireclub – where customers decide what kind of sadistic fate should befall anonymous women in some far-off dungeon – the objections against the site are legal, not moral. As one character says, torture, like prostitution or drugs, has simply become another commodity governed by the laws of supply and demand.
Nevertheless, the film itself peters out with a decidedly moralistic denouement, perhaps an attempt by Assayas to show that he doesn’t believe anyone deserves Diane’s fate, even if it does represent an ironic comeuppance for her amoral behaviour. Assayas, a sophisticated filmmaker who has previously directed such films as Irma Vep (1996) and Late August, Early September (1998), should be commended for delivering a polemic in the phrasing of an action thriller. But given the almost frustrating convolutions of Demonlover – a film that contains intelligent subtexts about the pervasiveness of media in our culture, the effects of economic globalization on the sex trade and a future in which moral arguments against violent pornography will be complicated by the development of photorealistic computer graphics imaging – this ending is much too easy and distinctly lacking in complexity. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.