"demonlover"

Assayas is so disciplined about maintaining a distanced, observant tone that at times "demonlover" risks looking as disaffected as the world it depicts. But the images he and cinematographer Denis Lenoir put on-screen are never disposable commodities. Even with the coolness of his approach, the images carry weight and meaning. "Demonlover" takes place almost entirely in the world of the temporary: in planes, hotel rooms, offices, restaurants, night clubs. Lenoir has shot the movie in CinemaScope to emphasize the white sterility of those surroundings. (When we see colored neon refracted through raindrops on a windshield, the image seems to have strayed in from a place where warmth still exists.) The demarcations between one country and another, between day and night, between work and private life, have given way to an undefined, enveloping space -- the amorphous, consuming marketplace. Identity is just as impermanent: "Diane" is a wholly made-up persona -- we never discover exactly who this woman is.

The movie itself might dissolve if Connie Nielsen weren't there to hold it together. Assayas recognizes that Nielsen is one of the movies' natural goddesses; her height and carriage and porcelain beauty say that the screen is hers to take by right. Nielsen burrows beneath Diane's ice-queen surface as the events of the movie and the hidden motivations of the other characters prove her to be a few crucial steps behind. She's in an impossible situation here, playing a character whose survival depends on keeping a placid surface while suggesting the cracks in that surface that give us a whiff of the raw fear underneath. And, playing a character whose motivations and actions are increasingly and purposefully not spelled out, Nielsen has to find a coherence where none exists. That she does is a testament to her talent. Nielsen has the most direct, harrowing moment in the movie, our final glimpse of Diane, staring straight into the camera at us, accusing and fearful. It's a moment that aims to abolish the distance between actor and audience, and the look on Nielsen's face is one that may rob you of sleep.

Nielsen told the Village Voice, "It was a challenge to try and make a weird sort of sense from the complete illogic of [Diane's] choices, but if you start asking yourself why and how and what all the time, the whole thing starts to disintegrate." Some sort of sense does emerge from Diane's choices. In a way, she's the movie's ultimate corporate player, the one who grasps the deepest, most unapologetic urges of corporate life and surrenders herself to them. She's the movie's "O" learning obedience at the villa of the Fortune 500. Tempting a metaphor as that is, it doesn't make the movie any less of a cheat, which always has to be the judgment of a movie where the thematic meanings are not expressed in terms of the plot and characters it sets up. But it would be equally wrong to say that Assayas is lying for insisting that "demonlover" proceeds according to an alternative logic.

Where "demonlover" leaves him in terms of his own career is almost impossible to say. Assayas is now working on his next movie, starring his ex-wife and "Irma Vep" star Maggie Cheung. If it turns out to be a more "conventional" narrative than "demonlover," it's almost a given that this film's admirers will talk disappointedly of his retreat. What's most disturbing about Assayas' statements about how narrative moviemaking is played out is that he's selling his own talent short, denying what he's brought to the form. "Irma Vep" is one of the miracles of modern movies, maybe the most joyous, inclusive celebration of moviemaking that movies have given us, and an abiding statement of faith in the potential that remains in the art form.

And the film that followed, "Late August, Early September," is more accurate about the aspirations of people in their 30s and early 40s who are drawn to the arts than any other movie I know. It's nonsense for Assayas to say, "To make movies in a world where people don't have cellphones, are not exposed to modern images ... that is exactly what movies should not be," because that's a perfect description of the film he made before "demonlover," the 19th century period piece "Les Destinées."

"Les Destinées" was exactly what Assayas should not have been doing (I made it about a third of the way through its three-hour length), and part of the problem was that a director as attuned to the contemporary world as Assayas is, was working with material that cut him off from his strengths. But to say that only contemporary art can have any relevance, or that classic forms, no matter how intelligently and probingly done, are reactionary, is hideously reductive. "Demonlover" demonstrates equally the traps and the breakthroughs that can come from being so up-to-the-minute.

Assayas is clearly concerned with how new technology is shaping our lives and our characters; he's concerned with how it's changing our experience of art, and how, in conjunction with big business, it's changing our notions of morality. Is morality even possible, he seems to be asking, in a world where every desire can be privately fulfilled? (It's ironic that several reviews of "demonlover" have compared it to William Gibson's beautiful novel "Pattern Recognition," which sees much more hope and features the writer's most coherent and satisfying plot.) Assayas is right that there are new ways to make movies, but all he seems to find in the new technology is depersonalization and brutality. In some ways, "demonlover" is the first Luddite film of tomorrow.

For all its faults, it's also a hard, unsparing look at where we are right now, at how work has taken over every aspect of our lives, about how all art, feeling, relationships and morality stand on the brink of being commodified, and about how we are both seduced and repulsed by those possibilities. You can see all the structural and psychological woolliness in "demonlover," you can be exasperated by it or turned off by it, and still feel it's one of the most vital pieces of moviemaking in recent memory, still feel that it tells you more about the tenor of the moment -- maybe more than we're ready to acknowledge -- than any other recent film. It's a movie worth arguing about.

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