Before I go into any level of detail about this movie (which honestly won't be much), I should say upfront that I expected more from this since it's supposed to be part of this New French Extremity. What I ended up getting was rather tame and, worst of all, just plain boring at times.The plot, if one can call it that, revolves around several people who work for a few different companies. One is TokyoAnime, who specialize in animation and manga; the second is the titular Demonlover, a website where people can watch hentai; and the third is Mangatronics, Demonlover's primary competitor. There's also a torture site called Hellfire Club which may or may not be run on the sly by Demonlover. I suppose that last site could have made for a more graphic and explicit film if they'd chose to focus on that, but no, all you get is a dull slog about corporate spying among companies who just happen to deal with some rather sleazy stuff. However, there's only really one scene where you get to see exactly what this content is and a lot of it is blurred out.Moving on, the acting in this movie was passable although it's not what I would consider great by any means. Connie Nielsen and Gina Gershon, in her limited screen time, come off the best but mostly because their characters were the least annoying. Another major fault of this movie is writing. Aside from a lack of coherence in the general storyline, the characters are all varying degrees of unsympathetic and, at times, grating to the ears. Chloe Sevigny is probably the worst offender, as there are scenes where she'll lurch from calm and sedate to bitchy and screechy without much motivation or reason. On the whole, there is not a likable character to be found and the confusing plot didn't do them any favors at all.On a technical level I can sort of give this a pass because it was low-budget, so it wasn't too unexpected that most of the film was shot up-close and hand-held. Most of the time, they gave you enough of a look at what was happening so that it wasn't visually disorienting. Still, there are a couple of scenes in which this filming style is detrimental. One was a catfight between Connie Nielsen and Gina Gershon's character in which it's often hard to tell who's hitting who and where they exactly are at any given moment. The other was a chase scene towards the end.Overall, given the subject matter, or at least what I thought the subject matter was going to be, I have to say this film was a disappointment. It was overly confusing, poorly written with unlikeable characters and, worst of all, rather boring. With such sleazy content involving animated porn and torture sites, they chose possibly one of the worst angles to approach it from and certainly one of the least compelling. It kind of improves in the last 30 minutes or so, but that doesn't excuse the nearly 90 minutes that came before it. If discussions about contracts, clauses and market share are your cup of tea, by all means check this out. For me, however, it was just a dud and waste of my time and money.

Compare this with 'Summer Hours' or 'Les Destinees' and you'll see that Olivier Assayas has as wide a range of styles as any current filmmaker I can think of. That said, this surreal, intentionally obtuse story of corporate intrigue centering around world domination of anime porn, makes less and less sense, climaxing with an 'ironic twist' you can see coming from several miles off, and leaving one with the feeling that the film is slightly less intelligent than one might have hoped. On the other hand, It did improve on a second viewing. While the ending still bugged me, the odd, slightly irrational middle felt more in control and intentional, more a comment on it's main character than I caught the first time around.One of those films that can be enjoyed as a high-end, visceral, well made ride, as long as you don't demand perfection or high art.

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

Much has been said about this film in other high-rated user review that need not be repeated here. Assayas has obviously seen a whole number of Hong Kong movies as this is nothing less than a French HK thriller. The themes may have been a bit old and trite even as the film came out ("You don't have that in France yet, right" as the Americans remark at one point) but there's always a trade-off to be made between elitism and populism. Certain media events concerning real torture that shape our perception now had not transpired either, and even the fictional internet doesn't appear totally made-up yet.Contrary to what some reviewers thought, the plot didn't have any holes that I noticed. In the second half (after the fight with HK style near-deadly deception) the pace merely accelerates and showing every step of the development would have been even more populist. In the end, as HK cinema fans know very well, the dark decisions and desires of the human soul let everything go to hell.The cinematography is faultless, and the actors - especially the main anti-heroine - express everything in a very non-extreme but nonetheless crystal-clear way. This is a great film that does not overstep the boundaries of entertainment, as there are really no explicit scenes to be seen, yet it leaves a very strong message about the life people are creating (or rather destroying) through their decisions and actions.