October 24, 2003
By D.K. Holm
The Avengers
DEMONLOVER
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
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Occasionally, but not very seriously, I worry that there are too many movies. Hollywood alone releases something like 500 films a year, which is commensurate with its output at the height of the studio era in the late '30s and early '40s. Add international films on top of that and it's easy to see how so many films can get lost in the media struggle that basically only allows one or two movies a week to dominate attention. Yet at the same time we all have the experience of opening the newspaper's movie page and not being able to find anything to see. Where are all the quirky, individual, indie films that serious film journals are advocating? Well, a good underrecognized indie or international film does turn up occasionally in the nation's backwaters, but for each one I discover I worry that there are scores of others whose reviews I haven't hit upon in VARIETY or which haven't sneaked into the local rep house. Such films don't even have to be good, necessarily. I'm not in the market for "official" masterpieces. I just want good or interesting films that provide an alternative to the uniformity of most Hollywood films and which introduce new or evolving directors with a vivid narrative and/or visual style.
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That's the way I feel about DEMONLOVER. It's a good, but not a great film. In fact, I don't even think that it was made to be "liked" in the conventional sense. DEMONLOVER is very interesting to me, however, but I'm also aware that its quirkiness rhymes with mine, so I don't know if I would ever really recommend it to anyone else. All I can really lay claim to is having watched it three times on tape, both in an effort to penetrate the mysteries of its plot and to immerse myself in its odd yet attractive atmosphere
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DEMONLOVER concerns corporate spying. The main character is Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen ). She works for the French tycoon Henri-Pierre Volf (Jean-Baptiste Malartre) and his unnamed company. Volf is trying to put a deal together that involves a porno company called TokyoAnime and an American sex website called Demonlover. Meanwhile, a third company called Mangatronics wants in on the deal with TokyoAnime, and to that end the company has somehow managed to either buy off Diane or place her in the company in the first place. Her mission is to wreck the Demonlover deal.
But Diane is not the only spy on the premises. Like Caesar (or Kennedy in Stone's JFK), he is surrounded by enemies and doesn't know it. As the film progresses, we learn that Volf's assistant on the deal, Karen (Dominique Reymond), whom Diane poisons to shove her out of the way, as well as Volf's trusted subordinate Herve Le Millinec (Charles Berling), and Karen's assistant, Elise Lipsky (Chloe Sevigny), all are also either working for Demonlover or yet another company.
The film follows Diane as she falls deeper into the machinations of corporate espionage and vandalism. The film begins on a flight from Tokyo to France, with Diane, Volf, Herve, and Karen. Diane contrives to spike Karen's Evian water with something that looks like it is called Hanadol, and when Karen gets into the airport she collapses, whereupon she is kidnapped by two Mangatronics goons who steal whatever files she has. Karen's enfeeblement leads to Diane's elevation. But Diane's promotion sparks the ire of Elise, which at first we think is born of loyalty to Karen, and then think is based on her resentment that Diane treats her like a slave, then finally to learn that she is also a spy.
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Both Diane and Elise are odd characters. Elise has a habit of fondling sleeping or passed out women and of playing video games in the nude. Diane is a very closed off person who sends a lot of mixed signals. Alone in her Tokyo hotel room she turns to the lesbian sex action channel (I guess they have these in hotels), and also finds herself inexorably drawn to a website called Hellfire Club. As explained in the movie, this is a website, possibly based in Russia (though it turns out to be France), that shows the torture of women for the amusement of nameless international subscribers. In a way, the site resembles what turns out to be the set-up in MY LITTLE EYE. Diane, the Huntress, obviously has some issue about power and her sexuality.
Into this mix comes another hot chick, Elaine Si Gibril (Gina Gershon). She is one of the representatives of the sex website Demonlover.com. Along with her associates, she descends into Paris wearing tight jeans, a t-shirt, and a big man's watch, and immediately wants some pot. She is sexy and competitive and when the subject of Mangatronics comes up in a meeting she notes that the TokyoAnime deal could put it out of business, whereupon she says sexily, "I say let's do it." When she is not plotting corporate destruction, she is off buying new boots with Elise.
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Her attitude to life is much different from the tortured, shy, confused Diane, or the sly Iago that is Elise. The director of the film, Olivier Assayas, is one of those guys that reviewers are apt to say "loves women," but I think that his reaction to the them is much more complicated than just love. I think there is a little bit of fear and a lot of suspicion, but also some curiosity and real interest. Diane is an unpleasant person in most ways, and in a different kind of movie (something like NEXT STOP WONDERLAND) we would be impatient with her. She doesn't even know herself, and that becomes obvious as the film progresses.
Assayas is a critic turned filmmaker (yay!) who has directed about a dozen films which he has also written as well as scribed a dozen more after that. He is capable of traditional seeming family dramas, such as his previous film, LES DESTINEES, but is also interested in the cinema itself as a subject of his films, with a special affection for Asian films. He has made a documentary about Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and an earlier film called IRMA VEP starred Maggie Cheung. DEMONLOVER is actually more like VEP, thanks in part to its interest in female action costumery. An homage to silent French suspense serials (Irma Vep is an anagram of vampire), VEP reduces the enthusiasm for those films down to the idea that beautiful slinky women don skin tight leather outfits to do mysterious things at night are inherently interesting.
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If French serials are the signature reference in IRMA VEP, than THE AVENGERS is the grail in DEMONLOVER. As the story moves toward resolution, Diane is exposed, and becomes the slave of Elise, who takes her to a chateau where the Hellfire Club doings are staged. With this, Diane, who on her second trip to the chateau wakes up wearing a black leather racing costume patterned on something that Diana Rigg would have worn, realizes that she much prefers living out her life as a submissive than as the dynamic corporate slayer that her undercover assignment demanded she be. As the movie ends, she is bound and encased in latex, an anonymous figure there to tweak the sexual interest of an equally anonymous American high school student, who has the Hellfire Club site open on his computer.
The trajectory of DEMONLOVER turns Connie Nielsen's Diane into Séverine Serizy in Luis Bunuel's BELLE DU JOUR. She's a woman who learns that she finds complete freedom in slavery. When Elise turns the tables on her at one point, it's like that scene in TWIN PEAKS when Catherine Packard turns the tables on the upstart Jocelyn Packard and turns her into a virtual house servant. She kind of digs the reversal, and so does the viewer. It takes the whole movie for Diane to learn this about herself, to learn that she is a "demon lover," a lover of the dark side of her unconscious. But as she says at one point, "No one sees anything. Ever. They watch but they don't understand." Connie Nielsen is a not quite totally fascinating actress yet. I've seen her in about four movies in 12 months and I wonder why directors keep casting her. For one thing, she seems to demand that they give her a terrible haircut. Second, she seems more like a lesbian icon than a teenage boy's idol. And she seems difficult. On the BASIC disc she revealed that she hated wearing the special boots that director McTiernan had designed for her, to help shape her character. If something that simple bothered her, what the heck did she think of all the leather gear that Assayas had in store for her?
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DEMONLOVER takes place in various clean, antiseptic settings: corporate offices, airplanes, hotels. The Tokyo hotels put you in mind of LOST IN TRANSLATION, and the little televisions screens in the airplane at the start of the film, showing violent activities as a general backdrop to the lives we busily lead, are reminiscent of the little screens on the shuttle in 2001. The shots of cars dashing around madly evoke SOLARIS. If Assayas is drawn more to sci-fi for his models of modern life it's probably because he wants that extremity of purification to contrast with the grubby fantasies enacted before the unblinking internet eye in the Hellfire dungeons. DEMONLOVER is not "perfect" (I didn't understand a whole sequence in which Diane picks up Elise in a car, drops her off, then picks her up again), but it's rough edges are really only a verification of the weird and difficult things it is trying to deal with which no typical Hollywood film can or would.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume Three
KILL BILL VOL. 1
Since Connie spends some of her time running around in a tight leather Emma Peel-style jump suit, it put me in mind of KILL BILL. But then everything does these days. I'll be in a theater watching, say, RUNAWAY JURY or SCARY MOVIE 3, and I'll know that just a couple of doors down KILL BILL is playing and that I'd really much rather be there regardless of the quality of the thing I am watching. Is this a common occurrence? Am I the only one obsessed with this film? Or is there a national preoccupation with this magical movie? Tarantino has made a film that acts on us the way that movies in general act on him, inspiring revisits, reassessments, and in general spending time in its company.
I also think about KILL BILL and Tarantino a lot while I am walking around the city. It's autumn here now, and as the wind blows little tornados of leaves through the park, I become somewhat melancholy pondering Tarantino and his movie. I think about the several friends and acquaintances I have who seem to be so much like him, yet haven't achieved the kind of wild success he has. These are people who could be buddies of his in movie watching if they only met, and can probably match the competitive trivia collector in minutia. They are also aspiring filmmakers, but beginning to settle into relationships and jobs and the daily run of life because it's easier, I guess, than pursuing that goal of getting a screenplay purchased or a project mounted, an endeavor that requires a cast-iron constitution and rhino thick skin. I also worry about an anti-Tarantino backlash. I myself was kind of down on him between PULP FICTION and JACKIE BROWN, with his horrible television appearances and preening interviews, and my disgust with his habit of borrowing. But JACKIE BROWN, too, is a great film, and now I accept his magpie art.
In fact, I have a theory about KILL BILL. As is well known, Tarantino is a great borrower and there were authorship disputes over PULP FICTION, recounted in the three bios about Tarantino that came out in the mid-'90s. After the "failure" of JACKIE BROWN (more apparent than real), Tarantino went into seclusion in this new well-acquitted estate. I heard rumors through friends of friends of friends about what he was doing. But among the tasks he had set for himself was an immersion in American film directors, which led to his revival of interest in William Witney, the director of Roy Rogers westerns and other low budget films. Tarantino emerged in the pages of the NEW YORK TIMES to sing the praises of the late Witney. That article got me excited about Witney, but also Tarantino again. I think that among the other things he was doing while in seclusion was hunkering down and truly writing a screenplay, on his own. He did at least two, and this activity was a middle finger in the face of all the detractors who cast suspicions on whether he really write his scripts, such as Jane Hamsher in her book KILLER INSTINCT, about the making of NATURAL BORN KILLERS. In that book, Hamsher reprints a note Tarantino sent her that she offers up as evidence that Tarantino is almost illiterate and therefore, by inference, unable to actually write the scripts credited to him. I would speculate that Tarantino, with his long WWII script and with KILL BILL (but not the Elmore Leonard western adaptation he is also supposedly doing) is making a definitive statement that he is a writer-director, not just a director.
I'd like to think that Tarantino has fired up a new generation of filmmakers, the way Coppola and Scorsese and Lucas did back in their day. But the lethargy that has descended down upon me, my friends, suggests that there really is something special or driven about Tarantino that few of us have. Or maybe we're just suffering from the economy. Or the weather. Maybe the mood will pass, and next year sometime we will start up on those projects that we have been putting off for so long.
I also wonder if Tarantino has given up on American movies. Seeing how much the orientation of KILL BILL is geared toward Italian and Asian movies, I wonder if Hollywood has left him out as much as it has left out viewers like him. He indicates in one interview that he has immersed himself in the spate of recent violent Japanese films by Takashi Miike and others. There he finds the truth and cinematic style missing in Hollywood product." America is too big, it's profit margins too narrow, its need to cater to the mediocre middlebrow mindset and avoid extremes and variety too great. I note today that THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE has made in its first weekend almost as much money as KILL BILL has in three.
Most of these broodings are inspired by an excellent profile of Tarantino that appeared in last week's NEW YORKER, pages 147 to 159. This lengthy profile, by Larissa MacFarquhar, part of a special issue on movies and not on line, at least not the last time I looked, is a highly sympathetic and detailed portrait of the director, and it is the best of the recent batch of interviews timed to come out with the movie (though I haven't read the ROLLING STONE profile, which I hear is good, too). I've been reading this profile over and over, partly because it depresses me, and partly because it is inspirational. It also provides a couple of clues about what is going to be in the second volume of KILL BILL, scenes that seem to deviate from what is in the screenplay that is available on line.
One element that won't be in the second part is explicit sex. MacFarquhar notes that there is "almost no sex in his movies. He says that's because he can't deal with becoming yet another sleazy Hollywood director talking a girl into taking her top off, but it seems that, where his movies are concerned, sex just isn't his thing." In this regard Tarantino resembles some of great directors such as Welles and Coppola, who also rarely included sex scenes in their films, even when they could. Is there some connection between a vivid visual style and cinematic sexual modesty? Or is it due to secrecy? Do these people have something to hide? After all, there is a form of sex in his films. But it's toe sex. Tarantino lovingly shoots close ups of Thurman's feet. Sometimes the lens is so close you can count the hair follicles. It's often a convention in American movies that a character is introduced by a quick shot of how they are shod, but Tarantino takes that convention to new heights, or depths, both in the kinkiness of his foot and shoe obsession and in the proximity with which he seeks to place us near his heroines' tootsies.
Annotations The annotation websites keep coming out. A reader kindly sent me the link to this new one, a nice site whose background color mimics The Bride's yellow racing suit. By the way, I think I can contribute an annotation of my own. One reference I don't recall being mentioned anywhere else refers to the Charlie Chan series. Michael Parks, as the sheriff in El Paso, calls his deputy son number one, in homage to Charlie Chan's numerical designations for his obstreperous progeny, and the son calls him "Pop," just as the kids in the series call their dad Chan.
NEXT TIME: THE HUMAN STAIN.
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