Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71774 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-09-14
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Director's Cut, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French, English, Japanese
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 116 minutes

Amazon.com
The most fearless film yet by France's idiosyncratic Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep) is an unholy marriage of ruthless corporate thriller and sinister science fiction. Connie Nielsen is the American "ice princess" in a French multination, an ambitious executive whose betrayals and invasive tactics would make her a villain in any other film. Here she's just a pawn in a shadowy conspiracy that may involve contemptuous new assistant Chloe Sevigny and fellow dealmaker Charles Berling and takes her from the legal (if unsavory) commerce of Japanese Internet porn to the brutal market of underground pornography. Assayas directs his modern corporate nightmare with a voyeuristic style, a hard eye for disturbing images, and more passion than explanation. It isn't his most audience-friendly film, but his portrait of international commerce and image culture in the 21st century is impassioned and haunting--cinema for viewers hungry for ambitious and provocative filmmaking. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Criminally Underrated
Admittedly, DEMONLOVER makes a sharp left narrative turn at the halfway point that's going to confound viewers who are intrigued by the straightforward (and extremely absorbing) high-stakes opening. But that's no reason to dismiss the many, many things that writer/director Olivier Assayas gets absolutely right. In the end, DEMONLOVER is a fascinating mirror-world reflection (as William Gibson would call it) of where our global society might be just five minutes from now: the fittest who survive will be multilingual, career-consumed and ridiculously chic, but also soulless, as if missing the gene that supplies a sense of loyalty and ethics. The movie is a cautionary, though entirely plausible, tale of humans debased by their own lust for ungoverned capitalism. Every line of dialogue is about the business merger at hand; in the rare instances where feelings are discussed, they're usually about how *work* affects those emotions. The big wink here is that the characters don't even discuss business honestly, because each has duplicitous motives.

Technically, DEMONLOVER is a feast. Denis Lenoir's widescreen photography constantly dazzles -- many of the tracking shots are sustained in close-up (creating paranoia), and the color spectrum appears as if filtered through corporate fluorescence. (The neon-drenched Tokyo sequence is particularly hypnotic.) Jump cuts keep the narrative one step ahead of the audience. Sonic Youth's atonal guitar score creates the same mutant environment that Howard Shore pulled off in CRASH. Most significantly, Connie Nielsen's face (and hair and wardrobe) mesmerizes more than any CGI I've ever seen. Considering the labyrinthine motives of her character, Nielsen's exquisite subtlety may be lost on first-time viewers; on second look, her emotionless gaze speaks volumes.

Audiences (and critics) have unanimously attacked the "problematic" second half as an example of directorial self-indulgence. While I agree that it's not as satisfying as the first half, I don't think it's a total crash-and-burn (pardon the spoiler pun). Clearly, the ending is open to thematic interpretation, but I think Assayas is just saying that if our species isn't more careful, we'll end up like one-dimensional characters in a video game of our own devising - sure, winner takes all, but the rest of us suffer enormously.

Narrative ambiguity aside, DEMONLOVER is the great Hitchcockian/Cronenbergian espionage fantasia I've been waiting for. It makes sense that it would come from Europe, since Hollywood forgot long ago how to make their assembly-line genre exercises intellectually stimulating. (Like the animé porn within the story, Hollywood movies today represent no more than a calculated corporate commodity.) More than any other film from the last 2½ years, DEMONLOVER seems a product of the post-9/11 world - a not-so-distant future where overwhelming paranoia goads us to preemptively eliminate any form of potential competition before it can do the same to us. And how in doing so, we devour our own tail.

I expect this movie's reputation will grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years.

Sex? Voyeurism? Techno-mayhem? Slick futurism? You got it.
You also have quite a few detracting problems.

I must say, I'm surprised that there are no reviews for this item and I'm writing the first one. But then again, this movie has by-and-large, flown under most people's radar, and perhaps for most that is for the best.

I should probably say I hovered between giving this movie 2 or 3 stars for a while before I settled on 3. 2 seems to say "This movie is not worth watching" while 3 better says what I feel - "Might be worth watching."

Demonlover is a corporate intrigue and espionage film that seems to take place in the not-so-distant future, and concerns an employee named Diane who (ostensibly) works for a corporation looking to buy out a hot 3D cyber-pornography company called TokyoAnime. Also interested in these dealings are the fiercely, deadly competitive corporations of Demonlover and Mangatronics. The movie gives the impression that nobody is really what they seem in this movie, from Diane's boss, to her assistant (played by Chloe Sevigny), but you know, none of this really comes as any big surprise. Diane is not an ethical character, so when she gets more than she bargained for in finding out about a covert and dangerously-interactive S&M site, and soon... well, I don't want to give too many plot details away, but Diane raises the stakes for her own reasons...

After this, the movie descends into a sort of surreal, confused madness, sort of like the turn David Lynch took with Mulholland Drive, but... er, not really.

So, what's the problem? Well, for me, this movie never really distinguishes itself as or decides what it wants to be. It tries to put on some airs like it has the chops to be a high-concept art film, but a lot of it has that shoddy, direct-to-video, Cinemax pseudosexual thriller feel to it. This DVD is the R-rated version, and if you're looking for some direct, serious titillation, you'd probably be best served to look elsewhere, as more is implied than anything else.

I consider the photography and the cinematography to be pretty bad - I understand what they were trying to do, but I don't like the final product. As I said in my topic title, some parts of this movie are slick, if they had gone more with the slick, stylized photography instead of the "What the hell am I looking at" school of photography, I think the results would have been superior. This is a movie with flashy people, multinational corporations and high-tech cities, about pornography and voyeurism. A movie like this demands superior shooting and photography, which, especially in the latter parts, it does not deliver.

Many people will claim that the plot has no inconsistencies, and it takes you on the same wild, find-your-own-meaning ride that other, superior films do, but it doesn't. It tries the whole "confuse-you-to-make-you-really-think" ruse, but it's handled so ham-handedly and with such amateurishness that for me it doesn't work.

But this film is an interesting one at least, there are interesting elements to it, but I'm not sure I can recommend it. It's not horrible, but I'm not certain I could call it good. It's a fair movie, could have been *leagues* better. But, like I said, it feels less like a high concept art film than it does one of those sleazy-without-too-much-sleaze direct to video throwaways.

Olivier Assayas View of the Corruption of a Character...
Olivier Assayas creates a visually stunning film in a dark world where multinational corporations invest in anime porn with further interest to invest in 3-dimensional animated pornography. The investments in 3-D pornography attract large amounts of money as several clients seek investment opportunities. This also creates an atmosphere where corporate espionage becomes a tool to maneuver competitors as it could lead to a monopoly on the market of animated pornography. The only thing that drives the people in the business of animated pornography is the trail of money, which becomes a path of greed, violence, and murder.

The story begins on a plane flying from Japan to France where Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen) poisons one of the executives in her company in order for a rivaling company to gain access to information in a briefcase. This leads Diane into a spiraling exploit as she is put in charge of the Japanese account that manages the business of animated pornography. When she enters the business transaction she is aware that she is being followed by an unknown source. Nonetheless, Diane takes charge of her position and advances through the world of pornography while balancing it carefully with the company and the laws of France. However, she displays no concern for people as she ruthlessly proceeds in order to further her self-interest.

In the environment of Diane's own self-interest there are other people that are also looking out for their own interests by counter-espionage. This leads Diane into a world of internet pornography and sadistic elements of interactive torture over the internet. These people are, however, much more ruthless than Diane as they have no limits to how far they are willing to go in regards to making money.

Demonlover becomes a quagmire of moral values as Connie Nielsen's character wanders a path where she loses herself to pride, greed, and desire. On this path Diane finds herself lost and in a desperate attempt tries to survive as her life soon becomes expandable. Assayas intends to display the corruption of the character and how this corruptive treatment affects the awareness of the character in an uncompromising situation. Initially the story flows smoothly as Diane's life does, but as Diane becomes entangled the story loses itself very much like the character loses itself in the complex environment of deceit and greed. This provides an interesting point of view which is similar to David Lynch's Lost Highway, but Assayas never creates the hallucinatory effect that Lynch does and the film does not regain its balance as it becomes apparent what has happened to Diane.