Reviews (10)

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.

Brave New World
This highly sensual film uses the slick Emma Peel-in-a-skintight-jumpsuit-meets-the-Matrix veneer that most people associate with high stakes business acquisitions, fast cars and corporate espionage . . . and for the first half of the movie, that is exactly what is delivered---intrigue on a multi-national and multi-million dollar level showcased in exquisitely neoned Japan, overseas business class flights and minimalist board rooms. Diane, played to perfection by Connie Nielsen is the Emma Peel of a French investment house intent on acquiring a monopoly on Japanese animated pornography. Perfectly dressed and coiffed, she epitomizes the business woman who has it all: brains, savvy and a polished understated unfluctuating demeanor that make her hard to read and hard to penetrate. We watch her intriguingly non-react as she puts a woman colleague out of commission, discovers that someone else knows what she has done, make deals with an Internet pornography competitor on the metro and all around suppresses her intrinsic sense of womanhood as she stands by and watches----no smiles apologetically----a piece of Japanese anime explicit with enough sexist content to render anyone with the vaguest sense of feminism a bad case of the hives. The fimmaker's vision of people in general in a world consumed by a consumerism so out of control that it feeds off its own negative energy, is blurred; the defining line between men and women eroded by a viciously amoral competition.

Then comes the second half of the movie where so many things seem to happen for no real reason at all. Yes, we can see the varying factions surface as the desire to win control becomes more sharply delineated---but instead of making it all work somehow, where the message, although hidden, can be revealed by some careful consideration, the series of images seem to just run amok. At the end, Diane has reformatted herself a la Laura Croft to deliver the consumer with that which he desires. The message: I am unsure---perhaps intense interplay produces human anime with little sensibility other than winning the competition and delivering product. An unhumbled Diane glares out at the world from a computer screen---is she beaten---no---she has just metamorphed.

This film is not recommended to everyone. Those looking for a fluid plot will not be satisfied with its second half. However, if you enjoy the sense of the real world being shrunk even smaller in a global marketplace where nationality and language are no longer real issues and the Internet serves as a conduit for salving any desire, you may enjoy this director's vision.

What's With the Negativity?
When this opened here in San Antonio, the ad in the paper was very small. Upon arriving at the theater, I was astounded being the only person in the theater on a Saturday morning. Leaving the theater, I was like the Iraqi Army: in a state of shock and awe. I'm not sure why several reviewers here are trashing this film, because it is reflecting the times in which we live. For those of you who want to return to the days of Wizard of Oz, the Sound of Music and It's a Wonderful Life....stay in your homes and rent those DVDs because you just aren't ready to accept the new conceptual films that are coming from Europe.

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.

Demonlover, more like Boraphil....
Ok, it doesn't rhyme, but that is what this movie is. So if you're thinking, cool cast, Connie, Chloe, Gina; I'll give it a try, think again. The acting is just fine all around. Hats off to them. But the movie is sooooooooo slow. The payoff ain't worth time. It is about corporate espionage and some Japanimation porn. If you want a dark twisted movie, rent Dirty Pretty Things. That movie rocks. Late. ... Read more

Amazon.com

This sumptuous film follows the story of a marriage caught in the turmoil of social change. The beautiful Emmanuelle Béart portrays Pauline, wife of the heir to a prosperous porcelain industry. In 1900, when first she meets her future husband, Jean Barnery (Charles Berling), he's a Protestant minister unhappily married to another woman (Isabelle Huppert). After a scandalous divorce, Jean and Pauline marry and move to Switzerland, where they live a briefly idyllic existence, but Jean is drawn back into the family business, which is rocked by the rise of unions, the brutality of World War I, and the economic depression that followed. Throughout, Pauline fights to retain some semblance of their original love. Les Destinées manages to be both intimate and epic, every scene built from carefully observed details in setting and psychology. In the end, the portrait of an enduring marriage is richly affecting. --Bret Fetzer ... Read more

Reviews (5)

Love is everything
I read the reviews of quite a few people for this film and would like to comment on certain things omitted from their analysis. For starters, this is a movie about LIFE, so where to start with life? Pick a time zone for the beginning and end of the film. The comment of one intelligent reviewer was that the movie had no "meat" in the beginning or end and that the "meat" was in the middle, but he just doesn't understand that this is merely a movie about life. Why cut out the trip to America? The movie tries to realistically portray business problems and the problems with competing internationally, and it shows how management tried to deal with their problems, and portrayed management as being inept, which happens in life! This reviewer says there is no substance in this movie, but I submit that the reviewer did not pay attention while watching the movie.

This is a wonderful movie about life and the problems of life and relationships, and of love that dies, and a man that is brave enough at the end of the film to admit his shortcomings in life and to finally realize that love is everything, and that without love there is nothing, and this comment concludes the movie, while flashing back to the ballroom dancing, in the beginning, in the year 1900, when this couple was young and in love, which gives the movie closure; characters that you don't like are supposed to not be liked!!

I liked this movie very much and watch lots of international movies and like French films, and this is one of the best films I've seen in quite some time and gets close to a 10 out of 10 rating in my book. The movie appears to start and end abruptly, but keep in mind that this is only a movie about life, and that the starting point and ending point are merely moments in time.

Love endures--this film will not.
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the case of the film "Les Destinees," the beginning is in 1900, and the end arrives three decades later. In the middle is the meat of this film, and this includes:

A scandalous divorce
An idyllic soujourn in Switzerland
The First World War
The fortunes of a porcelain producing family
The inside of a swinging Parisian nightclub circa 1930
A religious conversion
An adulterous affair
The stock market crash of the 1920s
The production of several lines of porcelain
Cherry picking

And I have probably missed a few things...

Now while this DVD may last three hours, there is enough material in this film to make a mini-series. This is a sumptuous epic--gorgeous sets, marvellous scenery, wonderful costumes--but somehow or another all these lovely trappings just left me cold. It was like consuming a beautiful but hollow cake--perfect icing, but nothing underneath. The story was just too involved to condense adequately and meaningfully into three hours. There were many scenes that added nothing at all to the main thread of the story--the enduring nature of love. Many of the scenes could have been very comfortably cut from the film--at absolutely no loss to the plot. What was the trip to America all about? It added nothing--except, I suppose, it helped qualify "Les Destinees" as an epic, and the bar scene with all the wild young ones, and the religious conversion. Chop, chop chop--all worthless.

Charles Berling was excellent as the minister who dumps the church, but Emmanuelle Beart as his wife, Pauline was too wooden and pouty for my tastes. She trounced around the sets like a little girl. She looks good, but the acting....Now I am going to add here that I usually LOVE French films, and consume a regular diet of foreign films. This was a disappointment. If I rate "Les Destinees" against other French films, I would probably give it two stars, but if I match it against most of the tripe out there, it starts to look better, so for this reason, I am giving it three stars. If you are a French film fan, you may very well be disappointed in this.

A Thought Provoking Epic Tale
The production of porcelain and cognac are the axis around which this film revolves. The film documents and dramatizes the sacrifice involved in maintaining quality during hard political and personal times. Covering several decades, the film intelligently probes philosophical themes of love, duty, family, and death. The acting is superb. Be aware that the movie is some 3 hours, so allot the time. One of my favorite scenes is the waltz scene; the grace of this dance is captured by the turn of the head of Pauline (Beart).

A Visually Magnificent Tale of the Endurance of Love
LES DESTINEES is another one of those period pieces that reminds us of how magic cinema can be. Set at the turn of the century the plot revolves around a triangle of two women and a man who rediscover themselves at the cost of the changes the world endured in the time of the great wars. The importance of family is approached in a pungent way, fighting as it does here against the discovery of honest love: how far will a man of means risk his profession and his marriage for the love of an outsider? Though the story has oft been written and told, much of the success of this film lies in the capable acting hands of Isabelle Huppert, Emannuelle Beart, and Charles Berling. Erring on being a bit too long, the technical aspects of this film seamlessly hold your attention - a vital stage for some fine storytelling and acting.

an excellent movie.
I enjoyed this movie very much. It is a well crafted tale covering a long period of time of this family. It is rather long,approx three hours, but thoroughly enjoyable. It is on my will purchase list. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

Slow evolving character development
This is your typical slow evolving character development film that tries to capture a slice of life. More down trodden than up lifting and not really reflective of my life or anybody elses that I know which is typical of most French Films.

Life as it is
"Late August, Early September" depicts life as it is for two struggling writers trying to proclaim a space in modern literary world while meeting everyday chores of life and relationship. The movie has its own pace of revealing its characters and their interactions from an observatory angle. It also examines one very sensitive, tender yet socially uncomfortable relationship between a teen and a mature writer who just found himself questioning his achievement in his career at forty.

Intriguing and identifiable characters
Some will say french melodramas are too understated and long winded but i found myself thoroughly enjoying this character-driven gem. Editing is reminescent of Godard with its jump-cut scene transitions and non-static camera movements. If you like slow character-evolving films without the overt freudian-analysis and preaching, go check out the film at a rental before purchasing.

The Best French Film of the Year
Late August, Early September is a gem. If you like Rohmer, but need more 'character complexity', this film will satisfy your need for intellectual stimulation, poignancy, and reality.

This film is to cinema what Kundera is to literature. ... Read more

Amazon.com

In the tradition of films about filmmaking, Irma Vep takes itsown special place among such films as Fellini's 8½. A has-been director decides to remake the silent French serial film Les Vampires starring a Hong Kong action film superstar. The production is falling behind schedule and its star, Maggie Cheung (who plays herself), finds herself an outsider with the film's crew save for a woman costumer (Nathalie Richard) who has a crush on her. Rene the director (Jean-Pierre Leaud) cast Maggie after viewing one of her many martial-arts fantasy films. Although he finds her perfect for the part of the jewel thief in Les Vampires, the rest of the crew cannot see the reasons for casting Maggie beyond her beauty and how she looks in her tight-fitting latex costume. Rene's vision is soon lost on everyone and he suffers a mental breakdown. The film is reassigned to Jose (Lou Castel), a seemingly more commanding director (although he takes the job because his welfare is about to run out), whose first decision is to fire Maggie. Irma Vep is presented as a comedy, but at its heart lies an examination of the art and craft of filmmaking. In a clever turn, Maggie creeps around her hotel getting into character, in essence remaking Irma Vep for real-life director Olivier Assayas. Assayas wrote the film in 10 days and shot the film in a month after meeting Maggie Cheung at a film festival--a fascinating case of life imitating art... or is it the other way around? --Shannon Gee ... Read more

Reviews (25)

Notions in different directions...
Maggie Cheung, as herself, comes to Paris to partake in a remake of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires as Irma Vep. However, when Maggie arrives three days late to the set she finds a disorganized film company trying to hold together a group of actors, a crew, and filmmakers who all have different agendas. Nevertheless, Maggie tries her hardest to fit in, even though she does not speak any French, and she tries to get a good grip of the character that she intends to cast. Meanwhile, the director is having problems keeping himself emotionally together and the film's future becomes jeopardized. Irma Vep is an interesting film that portraits thoughts that are not followed through with or that cannot be followed through with unless they are organized.

Quelque chose de different
The French do self-reflexive cinema better than we do. This tale of a has-been director attempting a comeback with a re-make of a silent French serial (and using a non-French speaking real-life Maggie Cheung in the title role) is the ultimate exercise in cinematic intertextuality. But it's also a lot ofe fun and not--as one of the film's own characters grouses about the state of French cinema--just intellectual navel gazing. Not for everyone, of course, but for lovers of cinematic irony, it's hard to think of a more delightful feelm.

Leaping latex lesbian vampyres, Rocky!
I truly fail to understand those who consider this a serious cinematic masterpiece. It pales in comparison, for instance, with other Maggie Cheung vehicles such as "In the Mood for Love" or "Song of the Exile". Indeed, one of the four rating stars is purely for the presence of Maggie as something at least close to her off screen persona (ok, I admit to a bit of a crush here :-).

On the other hand, it is not the abysmal drek others rate it. The plot is drolly amusing, along the lines of a mid-level American TV sitcom. And as one who has been in similar situations a few times, the depiction of Maggie's perplexity and detachment when thrust into making a film in Paris while speaking no French rings true.

The side-plot of Zoe, the costumier, who develops a crush on Maggie while fitting her with the black latex catsuit in a Paris sex shop, is amusing and well handled. Nathalie Richard is just right (and dang cute) as Zoe, a grown woman regressed to breathless teenage puppy love.

Maggie wanders through it all with gracious aplomb as everything and everybody is falling apart around her, intrigued by Zoe's interest though ultimately declining.

For those who haven't read the previous hundred reviews, a brief summary: Maggie Cheung, playing herself, arrives in Paris on a movie set in chaos. The director has chosen her to play the part of a cat burglar (Irma Vep) in a remake of a classic silent film, on the basis of obsessive viewing of Cheung's Hong Kong action films (I think it was Heroic Trio he was watching). [Real life director Arrayas was Cheung's boyfriend, later husband. Art imitating life, or vice versa?] Maggie is the calm center of a swirl of studio politics, backbiting and romantic advances (male and female). She goes to a late night party, and one night dreams (?) that she gets tricked up in her cat suit and burgles another room in her hotel. The director, dysfuntional at best, eventuallly has a breakdown. A new director decides he needs a French actress to play a classic French role, and Maggie accepts calmly(probably glad to get out of this mess). The last we hear is that she has cashed in her return ticket for a flight to New York to meet an American director.

Hmm...
Seeing this movie has left me flabbergasted. I guess it's one of those either-you-love-it-or-hate-it movies. But let me be objective about this. It comes across as a masochistic satire on contemporary filmmaking, ridiculing on all points the folly of churning out meaningless movies filled with gore, violence, and Schwarzenegger. The storyline is simple: Director wants to shoot movie, crew is unstable, everything falls apart... and voila... the 5-minute ending redeems the 2-hour jargon that just took place before your eyes. But you can't beat having Maggie Cheung running around in that latex suit. Overall acting was precise, intense, and really, you can't ask for more. There is lot of handheld camera movement, so make sure to take your motion sickness pills. I sat watching this movie flicker in front of me. One hour later, I was still waiting for something good to happen. I am somewhat disappointed, I guess. I feel that a lot of time has been wasted on cinebabble. The ending's good, though. All in all, I'd rather have watched 20 minutes worth of the film than in its entirety.

The movie sucks the life out of you.
Unbearably pretentious rot. *Irma Vep* has nothing going for it, unless you consider the admittedly enjoyable spectacle of Maggie Cheung tromping around in skin-tight black latex. It's shot in the form of a "documentary" about a French re-do of the silent-era film serial *Les Vampires*. First of all, why would anyone want to remake *Les Vampires*? -- second of all, why would anyone want to watch a documentary about the making of it? It's unpalatable any way you look at it. Further, director Olivier Assayas embarrasses us by having Jean-Pierre Leaud ("Antoine Doinel" from Truffaut's *The 400 Blows*) attempt to speak English: the result is a mumbling disaster. It's as if Assayas is purposefully trying to denigrate the entire French cinematic tradition, from the silent classics (Arletty is invoked, of course; no lustre rubs off) to the New Wave. Meanwhile, Maggie Cheung looks mystified and somehwat irritated at the proceedings. The ending, by the way, is one of the worst I've ever seen. ... Read more

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 ... Read more

Reviews (10)

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.

Brave New World
This highly sensual film uses the slick Emma Peel-in-a-skintight-jumpsuit-meets-the-Matrix veneer that most people associate with high stakes business acquisitions, fast cars and corporate espionage . . . and for the first half of the movie, that is exactly what is delivered---intrigue on a multi-national and multi-million dollar level showcased in exquisitely neoned Japan, overseas business class flights and minimalist board rooms. Diane, played to perfection by Connie Nielsen is the Emma Peel of a French investment house intent on acquiring a monopoly on Japanese animated pornography. Perfectly dressed and coiffed, she epitomizes the business woman who has it all: brains, savvy and a polished understated unfluctuating demeanor that make her hard to read and hard to penetrate. We watch her intriguingly non-react as she puts a woman colleague out of commission, discovers that someone else knows what she has done, make deals with an Internet pornography competitor on the metro and all around suppresses her intrinsic sense of womanhood as she stands by and watches----no smiles apologetically----a piece of Japanese anime explicit with enough sexist content to render anyone with the vaguest sense of feminism a bad case of the hives. The fimmaker's vision of people in general in a world consumed by a consumerism so out of control that it feeds off its own negative energy, is blurred; the defining line between men and women eroded by a viciously amoral competition.

Then comes the second half of the movie where so many things seem to happen for no real reason at all. Yes, we can see the varying factions surface as the desire to win control becomes more sharply delineated---but instead of making it all work somehow, where the message, although hidden, can be revealed by some careful consideration, the series of images seem to just run amok. At the end, Diane has reformatted herself a la Laura Croft to deliver the consumer with that which he desires. The message: I am unsure---perhaps intense interplay produces human anime with little sensibility other than winning the competition and delivering product. An unhumbled Diane glares out at the world from a computer screen---is she beaten---no---she has just metamorphed.

This film is not recommended to everyone. Those looking for a fluid plot will not be satisfied with its second half. However, if you enjoy the sense of the real world being shrunk even smaller in a global marketplace where nationality and language are no longer real issues and the Internet serves as a conduit for salving any desire, you may enjoy this director's vision.

What's With the Negativity?
When this opened here in San Antonio, the ad in the paper was very small. Upon arriving at the theater, I was astounded being the only person in the theater on a Saturday morning. Leaving the theater, I was like the Iraqi Army: in a state of shock and awe. I'm not sure why several reviewers here are trashing this film, because it is reflecting the times in which we live. For those of you who want to return to the days of Wizard of Oz, the Sound of Music and It's a Wonderful Life....stay in your homes and rent those DVDs because you just aren't ready to accept the new conceptual films that are coming from Europe.

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.

Demonlover, more like Boraphil....
Ok, it doesn't rhyme, but that is what this movie is. So if you're thinking, cool cast, Connie, Chloe, Gina; I'll give it a try, think again. The acting is just fine all around. Hats off to them. But the movie is sooooooooo slow. The payoff ain't worth time. It is about corporate espionage and some Japanimation porn. If you want a dark twisted movie, rent Dirty Pretty Things. That movie rocks. Late. ... Read more

Reviews (10)

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.

Brave New World
This highly sensual film uses the slick Emma Peel-in-a-skintight-jumpsuit-meets-the-Matrix veneer that most people associate with high stakes business acquisitions, fast cars and corporate espionage . . . and for the first half of the movie, that is exactly what is delivered---intrigue on a multi-national and multi-million dollar level showcased in exquisitely neoned Japan, overseas business class flights and minimalist board rooms. Diane, played to perfection by Connie Nielsen is the Emma Peel of a French investment house intent on acquiring a monopoly on Japanese animated pornography. Perfectly dressed and coiffed, she epitomizes the business woman who has it all: brains, savvy and a polished understated unfluctuating demeanor that make her hard to read and hard to penetrate. We watch her intriguingly non-react as she puts a woman colleague out of commission, discovers that someone else knows what she has done, make deals with an Internet pornography competitor on the metro and all around suppresses her intrinsic sense of womanhood as she stands by and watches----no smiles apologetically----a piece of Japanese anime explicit with enough sexist content to render anyone with the vaguest sense of feminism a bad case of the hives. The fimmaker's vision of people in general in a world consumed by a consumerism so out of control that it feeds off its own negative energy, is blurred; the defining line between men and women eroded by a viciously amoral competition.

Then comes the second half of the movie where so many things seem to happen for no real reason at all. Yes, we can see the varying factions surface as the desire to win control becomes more sharply delineated---but instead of making it all work somehow, where the message, although hidden, can be revealed by some careful consideration, the series of images seem to just run amok. At the end, Diane has reformatted herself a la Laura Croft to deliver the consumer with that which he desires. The message: I am unsure---perhaps intense interplay produces human anime with little sensibility other than winning the competition and delivering product. An unhumbled Diane glares out at the world from a computer screen---is she beaten---no---she has just metamorphed.

This film is not recommended to everyone. Those looking for a fluid plot will not be satisfied with its second half. However, if you enjoy the sense of the real world being shrunk even smaller in a global marketplace where nationality and language are no longer real issues and the Internet serves as a conduit for salving any desire, you may enjoy this director's vision.

What's With the Negativity?
When this opened here in San Antonio, the ad in the paper was very small. Upon arriving at the theater, I was astounded being the only person in the theater on a Saturday morning. Leaving the theater, I was like the Iraqi Army: in a state of shock and awe. I'm not sure why several reviewers here are trashing this film, because it is reflecting the times in which we live. For those of you who want to return to the days of Wizard of Oz, the Sound of Music and It's a Wonderful Life....stay in your homes and rent those DVDs because you just aren't ready to accept the new conceptual films that are coming from Europe.

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.

Demonlover, more like Boraphil....
Ok, it doesn't rhyme, but that is what this movie is. So if you're thinking, cool cast, Connie, Chloe, Gina; I'll give it a try, think again. The acting is just fine all around. Hats off to them. But the movie is sooooooooo slow. The payoff ain't worth time. It is about corporate espionage and some Japanimation porn. If you want a dark twisted movie, rent Dirty Pretty Things. That movie rocks. Late. ... Read more

Reviews (10)

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.

Brave New World
This highly sensual film uses the slick Emma Peel-in-a-skintight-jumpsuit-meets-the-Matrix veneer that most people associate with high stakes business acquisitions, fast cars and corporate espionage . . . and for the first half of the movie, that is exactly what is delivered---intrigue on a multi-national and multi-million dollar level showcased in exquisitely neoned Japan, overseas business class flights and minimalist board rooms. Diane, played to perfection by Connie Nielsen is the Emma Peel of a French investment house intent on acquiring a monopoly on Japanese animated pornography. Perfectly dressed and coiffed, she epitomizes the business woman who has it all: brains, savvy and a polished understated unfluctuating demeanor that make her hard to read and hard to penetrate. We watch her intriguingly non-react as she puts a woman colleague out of commission, discovers that someone else knows what she has done, make deals with an Internet pornography competitor on the metro and all around suppresses her intrinsic sense of womanhood as she stands by and watches----no smiles apologetically----a piece of Japanese anime explicit with enough sexist content to render anyone with the vaguest sense of feminism a bad case of the hives. The fimmaker's vision of people in general in a world consumed by a consumerism so out of control that it feeds off its own negative energy, is blurred; the defining line between men and women eroded by a viciously amoral competition.

Then comes the second half of the movie where so many things seem to happen for no real reason at all. Yes, we can see the varying factions surface as the desire to win control becomes more sharply delineated---but instead of making it all work somehow, where the message, although hidden, can be revealed by some careful consideration, the series of images seem to just run amok. At the end, Diane has reformatted herself a la Laura Croft to deliver the consumer with that which he desires. The message: I am unsure---perhaps intense interplay produces human anime with little sensibility other than winning the competition and delivering product. An unhumbled Diane glares out at the world from a computer screen---is she beaten---no---she has just metamorphed.

This film is not recommended to everyone. Those looking for a fluid plot will not be satisfied with its second half. However, if you enjoy the sense of the real world being shrunk even smaller in a global marketplace where nationality and language are no longer real issues and the Internet serves as a conduit for salving any desire, you may enjoy this director's vision.

What's With the Negativity?
When this opened here in San Antonio, the ad in the paper was very small. Upon arriving at the theater, I was astounded being the only person in the theater on a Saturday morning. Leaving the theater, I was like the Iraqi Army: in a state of shock and awe. I'm not sure why several reviewers here are trashing this film, because it is reflecting the times in which we live. For those of you who want to return to the days of Wizard of Oz, the Sound of Music and It's a Wonderful Life....stay in your homes and rent those DVDs because you just aren't ready to accept the new conceptual films that are coming from Europe.

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.

Demonlover, more like Boraphil....
Ok, it doesn't rhyme, but that is what this movie is. So if you're thinking, cool cast, Connie, Chloe, Gina; I'll give it a try, think again. The acting is just fine all around. Hats off to them. But the movie is sooooooooo slow. The payoff ain't worth time. It is about corporate espionage and some Japanimation porn. If you want a dark twisted movie, rent Dirty Pretty Things. That movie rocks. Late. ... Read more