Characters in Olivier Assayas movies are constantly consuming media. The stars of his films are as much spectators themselves as they are spectated by the audience: In Irma Vep, Maggie Cheung sifts through videotapes of Hong Kong action movies and silent French serials; 20 years later, in Personal Shopper, Kristen Stewart watches YouTube videos about the occult and clips from old movies. When Assayas’ avatars aren’t watching, listening or reading, they’re often producing media — like Juliette Binoche’s characters in Clouds of Sils Maria and Non-Fiction, acting in hyper-stylized superhero movies and police procedurals.
But no Assayas movie interfaces with multimedia experience and the many screens of 21st century life like 2002’s Demonlover, recently restored and uncut by Janus Films, with plans for an eventual physical-media release by The Criterion Collection. In one scene, Chloë Sevigny lies on a hotel bed nude like the subject of an Impressionist painting, playing the cyberpunk-influenced video game Oni on her PlayStation 2; Connie Nielsen surfs the web, fiddles with a camcorder, and watches forgotten nu-metal band Soulfly perform their hit “Back to the Primitive” on cable; Gina Gershon makes jokes about Lara Croft of Tomb Raider.
Both in content and style, Demonlover is a film that often feels like the restless, fidgeting uncertainty of browsing the internet or flipping through pay-per-view channels. It’s like a digital collage — a million lines of code, a thousand JPGs and GIFs, and a virtual ecosystem of vibes all smeared into one. In some ways it feels very dated, depicting an era when Internet Explorer felt like the final frontier — the flip phones, the now-primitive CGI sequences, the opening credits typed out in Impact font and a hilariously placed poster for Roland Emmerich’s misbegotten 1998 American Godzilla remake. But even 20 years later, Demonlover still drips with a kind of icy and innovative cool, a virtual Videodrome starring some of the hippest women who ever walked onto a movie set and a jagged razor blade of a score courtesy of Sonic Youth.
The plot is, in some ways, just window dressing — or maybe more aptly, screen dressing, a desktop background for a network of character relationships and transactions to unfold upon. We open in the most liminal of all spaces: an airplane, mid-international-voyage, with out-of-context explosions from anonymous action movies unfolding silently across the in-flight movie monitors while most of the passengers sleep. Diane (Nielsen) is a conniving, backstabbing agent in a French media company working at all costs to earn exclusive global distribution of the world’s most successful producer of hentai — Japanese animated pornography, varying from physical comic books to absurd and expensive CGI productions about superpowered girls with impossible proportions fighting zombies and being pleasured by tentacle monsters. Though anime was already a massive international industry in the early Aughts, it’s only become more prevalent and dominant in the West, a form of media that so many millennials and younger have become completely fluent in.
What begins as a trashy airport thriller — dripping with corporate espionage, sexual intrigue and anime clips that are sure to make the most stone-faced viewer blush — soon disintegrates into a pixelated labyrinth, somewhere in the no-man’s-land between the iconic anime Ghost in the Shell and David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Call it Lost Information Superhighway. Just as quickly as Diane rises to power, the tables are turned, and the formerly lowly secretary Elise ( Sevigny) becomes a powerful corporate dominatrix. Faster than a fiber-optic cable, Diane has fallen from her newly earned position as e-girlboss and corporate assassin to become a victim, an object of surveillance, an image.
More than a portrait of living through digital chemistry or a warning about losing yourself in and on the web, Demonlover is a study in transaction: Assayas constantly surveys and documents the swiping of credit cards, the signing of contracts, the jargonistic discussion of business deals. It’s a film about women who have advanced to the highest echelon of capital, but they’ve done it by destroying other women — and even then, they’re still living in a system in which they can easily become the action figures and playthings of men. Assayas, a French filmmaker, specifically casts non-French women — mostly American — to act in his film about the seedy workings of international capitalism to emphasize that these women are stars, the products of a film industry who have commodified their images. Though men play only a sidelined, almost marginal role in Demonlover, the absolutely jaw-dropping final images — the rare ending I would never dare spoil — reframe the entire movie to make us consider how these powerful women have still been dominated and brutalized by the patriarchy, even if they have previously seemed to be the authors and avatars of their own destiny. Demonlover is less an active condemnation of digital culture and more a sad resignation to the lack of free will we have in an algorithm-driven world. Even when you think you’re in charge of your life, someone else is almost always holding the controller.
