"demonlover"

Conniving her way into the catbird seat, Diane finds herself dealing with the attentions of her coworker Hervé (Charles Berling), who suspects she may have had something to do with Karen's assault but is just as happy to have Karen gone, and the suspicions and resentment of Karen's assistant Elise (Chloë Sevigny).

Part of the icy humor of "demonlover" is that Diane appears to be behind the game from the start. Assayas is out to take the measure here of a borderless, transient world in which the Internet, globalization, and corporate mergers and takeovers have obliterated any sense of continuity or personal loyalty. If the first two "Godfather" movies were the ultimate statement about crime as a logical extension of the corporate ethic, "demonlover" takes that logic to the next step. A mobster who betrays his "family" for the sake of some crime boss's grab for power is a piker compared to the multiple machinations of the characters in "demonlover." In one sense, the movie can't help but devolve into incoherence because it's dealing with a world where people's motivations are fractured, always up for sale.

"Demonlover" trumps the worst fantasies you can come up with about the moral rottenness of big business. When Diane dopes and kidnaps her competitor, she's simply doing business as usual. She's no colder or more calculating than anything going on around her. When Diane meets with the representatives of Demonlover and confronts them with the fact that their Web site is the entry to a secret site called Hell Fire Club, the company's executive, Elaine (Gina Gershon, playing the businesswoman as jaded rock star), explains, as blasé as she can be, "it's an interactive torture site," and her partner proudly adds, "the best, I'd say." Torture has become simply a new business venture, a niche to be filled by corporations determined not to be left behind in anything.

When Diane accesses the site herself, she's greeted by movies of models bound and gagged and shackled to electrified bed frames, or encased inside rubber catsuits and submerged in water. Accompanying the images is the invitation: "This is Zora. How would you like to torture her?" Users are invited to submit their fantasies and watch women dressed like Wonder Woman or Emma Peel (in other words, the predominant pop-culture icons of strong women) tortured to their liking. Your pleasure is only a few credit card numbers away. If you're as squeamish about torture scenes as I am, you should know that what Diane sees on Hell Fire Club is not explicit but rather rapidly edited, often in close-ups that blur the specifics of the action, and more suggested than lingered on. The scenes are not pleasant, but they're done with as much discretion as possible.

"I think that if most guys in America," Lester Bangs wrote in 1980, "could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least 75 percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up. She may be up there all high and mighty on TV, but everybody knows that underneath all that fashion plating she's just a piece of meat like all the rest of them." Even allowing for Bangs' consciously overstating the case, there's too much Susan Brownmiller hoo-ha in that passage for my taste.

But the truth in his words is reflected here in the way Assayas has keyed in to the essential reality of both the Internet and the present state of pornography: Every interest is catered to, from the most benign to the most repulsive. Assayas doesn't make it easy to agree with him, because he resurrects the clichés about porn as the white slave trade, the rumors of snuff movies, and the like. But he's not wrong in positing that the freedom and range of the Internet, coupled with the corporate determination to profit from any desire and keep the dollars coming by finding a way to go further, is heading toward some Sadean event horizon.

In his book "An Erotic Beyond: Sade," Octavio Paz said that in vilifying the state and glorifying the murderer, Sade aimed to replace public crime with private crime. "Demonlover" is an essay on how public crime (actually crime committed in secret by public companies) makes private crime possible. Consumers here are not the innocent marks of money-mad conglomerates; they're accomplices. Laying this stuff out risks making Assayas sound like the avant-garde William Bennett. But you don't have to be a Puritan or a would-be censor to be appalled at spam advertising "Russian Rape Sites" or the sheer brutishness flourishing in some corners of porn movies. And the cool ambivalence of "demonlover" is not the mark of a proselytizer but of a rigorous logician.

Assayas seems to agree with Sade that the logical endpoint of the erotic impulse is the desire to annihilate. He has coupled that here with the logical endpoint of capitalism -- the desire to annihilate all competition. "I say let's do it," Gershon's Elaine says when she outlines a plan for obliterating Demonlover's competitor, and the dirty curl of a smile on her face is the only pleasure she shows in the entire movie.

"Demonlover" flirts with clichés about media desensitization. In the opening scene, airplane passengers take no notice of TV monitors playing action-movie footage of explosions and burning bodies. No image, no matter how vile, elicits much of a reaction from anyone here -- not anime rape scenes or the schoolgirl porn Diane flips on in a Tokyo hotel room. Whatever Diane watches, her face registers nothing more than a distant, calculated interest in a new product. But what would seem like finger-wagging from some media watchdog means something quite different coming from a filmmaker of Assayas' caliber. This is a nightmare world for Assayas -- for any filmmaker concerned with the future of movies -- because it's a world in which people are no longer affected by images, in which images have been emptied of any meaning beyond their surface ability to please or excite.

Next Page: This movie might dissolve entirely without the porcelain beauty of Connie Nielsen, a natural goddess of the big screen

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