alr

demonlover

Screening on Film
Directed by Olivier Assayas.
With Connie Nielsen, Gina Gershon, Chloë Sevigny.
France, 2002, 35mm, color, 129 min.
English, French and Japanese with English subtitles.

demonlover deals in two bizarrely interconnected obsessions. On one hand: the sleek, vapid, liminal spaces of high-end corporate-run Late Capitalism, a la Christian Petzold. On the other hand: a dystopic Internet sphere filled to the brim with sadomasochistic erotica. Yet in Assayas’ world—just like our own—the lines between waning affect and ultaviolent affect are far from strange bedfellows: Characters move in non-place networks just like the digital smut they sell, and the film’s strangely banal catfights picture a world in which Internet-driven affect has already reached the point of satiated intensities—leaving its characters, and its viewers, stuck in an uncomfortable nightmare space of simultaneous excess and numbness.

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