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EUROTRASH. VIFF21. THE FINAL RECKONING

Demonlover - A Film Review by Alex Grant


A skinny-dip in to the deep end of the cesspool of cybersex Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover, for some unknown reason given its much heralded North American premiere at VIFF 21 on October 8th, is a tediously sensational corporate intrigue thriller most generously described as ‘Eurotrash’.

Yet one more vainglorious stab at breaking into the U.S. market akin to the far superior Jean Reno cop procedural The Crimson Rivers and the rumbustious occult epic The Brotherhood of the Wolf. Let’s wrestle big bucks away from Hollywood by aping its most crude offensive ‘product’!

Played by up-&-coming U.S. actresses Connie Nielsen,Chloe Sevigny and Gina Gershon a trio of two-timing corporate viragos commit heinous crimes in order to gain promotion and to sabotage their employers’ plans for world domination of the Japanese S&M erotic manga-anime market.

Their Machiavellian maneouvres bring them hard up against a ‘snuff’ torture website THE HELLFIRE CLUB which is luring women into its dungeons for utter degradation.
While idly toying with issues such as female empowerment and women’s liberation the pretentious writer director Olivier Assayas deludes himself as a cutting-edge director on the world-class cinema scene.

Replete with ultraviolence and kinky fetishistic sex Demonlover presents this offensive scenario with the glacial condescension of a Gallic Martha Stewart, a diabolical den-mother
Diane de Monx [Nielsen] plots to supplant her bosses’ confidante Karen in the Volf Corporation by feeding her surreptitiously an overdose of Haldol , a drastic anti-psychotic drug
Then a chain of internecine mayhem is unleashed, with every loony-tunes corporate diva either a double-agent or a fifth-columnist or just a nasty piece of work.

Demonlover gives a very bad odour to French cinema, which proportionately – quality as opposed to quantity of films produced annually – is the richest and most reliable source of viable art films. Assayas’ new film trots out all the most pernicious pseudo-philosophical chestnuts of his national cinema.

He simultaneously indulges all of the bullying in-your-face callousness of mainstream Hollywood product.

A rickety roller-coaster ride to nowhere Demonlover is a reckless pot-pourri of sensationalism for its own sake . Such a vicious exploitation film has no place in any serious film-festival. While striving to depict female empowerment it merely has the opposite sex degraded on screen yet again for the kicks of arrested adolescents.

© Alex Grant October 2002

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