Powerful

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This is a review of "Demonlover" and "Boarding Gate", two films by director Olivier Assayas."Demonlover" focuses on the manoeuvres of various multinational corporations as they vie for the financial control of interactive 3-D anime pornography. The film sees the postmodern world as an all-pervasive pornographic video game, in which every level or space is housed (like the rabbit holes in Lynch's "Inland Empire") within a seemingly infinite series of overlapping boxes and containers. This schema is what philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls the control society, in which the world is comprised of "open boxes" which exist in both physical space and cyberspace. Between and within these boxes humans float, carrying packets of information in which the content, in true McLuhan fashion, is always the content of another medium. In a sense, humans are transmitters or facilitators of information between these surfaces. They are the bridge between content and container.The film takes a very dark view of capitalism. Finance is codified as rape, sodomy, sex games and murder, whilst boardrooms and corporate offices become "boarding gates" or "access points" to bondage parlours, fetish dungeons and torture chambers, their dark shows broadcast live on the Net like stock-market indices. In true Croenenberg (Existenz, History, Promises), Kubrick (Eyes) and Lynch (Inland) fashion, the film is too smart to separate the real from the virtual (Matrix, Truman Show, Dark City), but instead works to show their indiscernibility.As the film progresses, Assayas shows how our social sphere has become conflated with the logic of interactive gaming. The world is a game-space, everything evacuated, laid flat, everyone a participatory avatar, everything governed by source code and every action a mere means to an end. All that counts is the score, individuals exclusively defined by their points or place in the game, which is also their spot on a corporate ladder in which the competition is unremitting and ruthless.Everyone in the film is thoroughly desensitised to sex and violence, accepting it all as a normalized part of the game. Globalization has taken the game worldwide, corporations all jostling for domination. The survivors are multilingual, career consumed, chic, genderless, androgynous, always in a state of flux and thoroughly devoid of Self. They are flexible and fragmented to the point of nonexistence. Their masks mask the fact that there are no identities to hide. When they speak, every sentence is about business, stocks, shares, mergers and the joys or traumas of unfettered capitalism. Feelings are understood entirely in relation to "work" and "usefulness".Assayas conveys the schizophrenia of our age by sticking to sustained, super close ups. Establishing shots are rare, the camera is nervous, anxious, while the colour palette is ultra modern, all cool blues and whites, neon lights and corporate fluorescents. As the game world suffers extreme cultural overload, its inhabitants must rely on blinders. Those who aren't myopic, where myopia is form of niche specialization, must learn to quickly process, digest, dismiss, skim and filter masses of information, lest they overload. Adapt to this toxic future or die. China and Japan are the new markets, the cutting edge of capital. In this game, some winners take most, most winners take some, and the rest suffer enormously. The game stresses dominance and submission, the film ending on a shot as spiritually empty as the end of Romero's "Dairy of the Dead". In "Dairy" the lone survivors of humanity are locked in a room with a computer screen. Here, Assayas has his hero "sucked into a computer"; atomized.If "Miami Vice" stresses the seemingly infinite speed and reach of the market, the constant swirl of product and the inability of human connections to be forged in transit, never mind the formation of a stable Self in a world of undercover masks and collapsible identities, then Assayas takes things to their absurd conclusion. In "Demonlover", companies unknowingly employ their enemies and are entirely populated or infected by undercover agents. There are no values outside of individual success and dominance. And as this routinised violence becomes embraced by the global culture, repressed violence and taboo sexuality slips to the underside and right back round again. The cyber is no longer the shadow of a culture which glamorises all that is obscene, rather, the boundaries between the cyber and the real are no longer perceptible."Boarding Gate" is also a film about boxes. Our protagonist, played by Asia Argento, moves between corporate offices, loading docks, airports, condominiums, sweatshops, shopping malls, nightclubs, toilets and abandoned workrooms. Like the hero of "Demonlover", she is part sex worker and part corporate lackey, bridging the worlds of the ultra rich and the hopelessly impoverished.Argento bounces from spaces packed with crowds of human beings to spaces which are completely empty. No space is her home. She belongs nowhere, the flux demanding that she become a creature of transience, rootless, a tool of functional anonymity. Quoting anthropologist Marc Auge, philosopher Steven Shaviro calls this a world of "non places" in which "transit points and temporary abodes proliferate under luxurious or inhuman conditions". Everywhere is a bus stop to somewhere else.The "Boarding Gate" of the film's title thus conjures up Deleuze's rhizomatic network, in which "any point can be connected to any other point, and must be". Argento travels from gate to gate, container to container, without ever arriving at a final destination. As Deleuze says, in the control society "you never finish anything", Argento subjected to a series of endless postponements, the same problems and conflicts simply deferred and relayed from one space to the next without ever being resolved. She moves from boarding gate to boarding gate, passed, traded and pushed while other people prosper.The film ends with Argento contemplating killing her handlers. She decides against it. They all think she's dead. They have no use for her. Better to live this way, she thinks. She slips away. A ghost, but free.8.5/10

Superior thriller about a corporate spy (Connie Neilsen) caught up in the big money, cutthroat world of internet porn. The film is filled with wonderfully shady characters, hidden agendas, and weird plot twists as Neilsen's attempts at sabotaging a deal with an adult anime company lead to unexpected revelations about the nature of the internet entertainment trade. While it moves like a suspense drama, it makes so many points and takes so many swipes at how otherwise normal seeming people are not above using the internet to peep at the lowest forms of degradation that it almost plays like satire. An interesting and very different kind of movie, with a frightening ending that hits very close to home.

The film looks slick, the actors are good, period. End of merits. Director Assayas needs to sit down and do some homework before he writes a script. You may not be familiar with things like corporate espionage and the porn industry -though if you're going to make a film about them, you certainly should- but being blatantly ignorant about "the Internets" is just unacceptable. This movie feels as dated in most of its plot contrivances as if it was made in the eighties, but it's only five years old as I'm writing this. I mean, things like: how can a website be "highly profitable" and "impossible to find" at the same time? And if so, how come a teenage kid just goes and finds it? Oh, them kiddos with them Googles and stuff...On top of this kind of ignorant devices it's pretentious, slow-paced, full of plot holes, and just doesn't go anywhere. It's hard to point my toes downward, but if I could, I would give this film a four-thumbs-down.

Can I go ahead and say it. "WOW". I wasn't sure what I was going to be getting myself into when I first picked up this film, but I had heard that it was up for some awards at Cannes, so I knew that I had to see for myself what the hype was all about. Again, all I can say is… "WOW". This film felt like a David Lynch story spiced with a bit of Francois Ozon. You never knew what was going to happen next and you didn't want to know. This film pushed you to the edge of the couch and kept you there for the entire two hours. The music, the acting, and the beautiful (and I mean beautiful) cinematography completed this wild and gritty masterpiece.Now, before anyone says something to me concerning the fact that I rented this film merely for the pornography would be making a very false statement. The pornography aspect of this film is very large, but in the same stance it is very small. Director Olivier Assayas is trying to make a statement about our societies infatuation with sex and the use of the Internet. He succeeds with the greatest of ease. Demonlover is one of those films where if you take away the pornography element, you would be left with still a very strong story. In fact, you could replace the pornography portion with any online business venture and you would still have a very frightening and political film. So, for those of you that think that this is nothing more than a pornographic film, I beg to differ. This is a story about our society and culture. It is a depressing story about the lack of respect for human life. Assayas hits this on the head with the ending when we watch our questionable hero becoming a subject for a teenage kid. The teenager does not see a life on his screen, but simply a business transaction. A cartoon or fictitious character, when in reality it is not.This film could not have worked so well if it were not for the actors. Connie Nielsen gives a brilliant performance of a woman who knows nothing and understands even less. She is being played by others that are not whom they seem they are. Nielsen is in the majority of this film, so it is up to her to help carry the story, and she successfully does it. She keeps the audience guessing, and her facial expressions force us to feel sympathy for her as the second half unfolds. Chloe Sevigny also is outstanding. I sometimes think that she just picks films that are random and as tangent as possible from the latest film that she did. She is a versatile actress that will have her name soon enough honored with an Oscar. It also wouldn't surprise me to see Nielsen there as well.Demonlover is the great un-Hollywood film that I have been waiting for. While it may be difficult for some viewers to enjoy, I thought that it ranked among the best that cinema has to offer. It is bold, expressive, and deeply rooted within the passages of our culture. Dark and disturbing only begin to describe this film. This is not for the faint of heart, but for those that love challenging cinema.Grade: ***** out of *****