I Would Like to See It: Demonlover

You don’t see many erotic thrillers positioning the acquisition of a hentai animation studio and its affiliated websites as their central conflict. Demonlover not only does so, but makes it crackle with a thorny, uncomfortable sexual tension as we watch the brittle and sexually fixated Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen) try to maneuver her way through a web of industrial backstabbing and espionage. Her classically “frigid” manner conceals a woman teetering on the edge of sexual oblivion, possessed by desire and struggling to sublimate those urges into capitalist dominance over the very artistic forces to which she is drawn. Opposite Nielsen is a strong, well-fleshed cast including a winningly sleazy and gentle Charles Berling as Hervé Le Millinec, the incomparable Chloë Sevigny as sleepy-eyed assistant Elise Lipsky, and Gina Gershon as pop punk web designer and erotica distributor Elaine Si Gibril.

With its material about the human relationship to pornography Demonlover walks a fine line between opacity and nihilism, never quite sure how deep it wants to sink its teeth into the moral and emotional elements of that connection. There’s a clear line between Hervé’s attempted rape of Diane and the film’s final scene in which a bored teenager commissions custom torture porn of a captive sex worker and then lets it play as background noise as he does his homework, a sense that these acts belong on a continuum. In the context of the film porn both allows the characters to externalize their desires and, once linked to capital, permits the desires of the vast and faceless market to act upon them with impunity. Desire itself is a neutral force in the world of Demonlover, but the tension as it begins to bleed into reality, writing over human skin and emotion with crass fantasies of pop culture figures penetrated, humiliated, imprisoned, and beaten is truly tooth-grinding.

The film’s script is admirably taut, even at nearly two hours, its dialog razor sharp, its characters clearly sketched and, although all are varying degrees of sharklike and ruthless, distinct. Its sex scenes benefit from both director Olivier Assayas’ quiet, intimate camera and truly excellent sound design which captures every shift and sigh with tender closeness. Demonlover is simultaneously cutting and dreamlike, vicious and decompressed, its corporate maneuvering and interpersonal entanglements developing with exquisitely paced elegance. There are only a few hitches, moments in which character behavior seems inscrutable, but they don’t detract from the film’s overall polish, and the grainy, attentive joy of every indoor shot from private flights to Tokyo hotel rooms is well worth overlooking minor incongruities. Deep blues and pinkish, sexual reds, road-flare whites and cool beige; Demonlover is a movie without a single thoughtless frame or piece of set design.