demonlover

Olivier Assayas, 2002
We have Assayas’ usual floating camera, breaking every now and again for SRS. It goes in and out, often close, floating quickly forward to frame, then missing something, then coming back. It is rarely overtly obtrusive, but always there, a signature style. Their are long takes, much much longer than with most handhelds; but Assayas in the scheme of things still cuts pretty quickly, often unnoticeably because it is in the middle of a movement. There is in fact quite a lot of elliptical editing, but the quite deliberate confusion of the moving frame can make this difficult to detect.
This film really struck us, it is a view of the world; to try and thematise it, we could talk about perceptions, affects, almost free-floating. This means colours, blocks of colours, as well as sounds, disconnected but material, striking us. They arent chucked at the viewer, but their, always their, always dispersed among others. Levels of saturation and contrast change between scenes, almost within scenes. The content is the style, a kind of airtight world, where at once everything breathes, is natural in that sense but is really plastic, artificial; it is a lived in world, an our world, in the twenty-first century. Is this what's left of nature?
It's difficult to talk about the content really. Here are some thoughts I had, passing through my mind; Assayas mixing art and commerce, the former soiled, but it's not that simple. Nothing is. Assayas comes back time and again to translation, communication, people who don't want to be together stuck together, passing on things that get caught in between. There is the mix of obscenity, violence, turning to paranoia, with an innocence (the babysitter!), nothing can be too serious, yet it is. This is a thriller, but there's no real abstraction, no distance kept; that would be impossible, when everyone is already distanced, watching themsleves being told who they are, trying to be someone else when non one can really be anything.
I'm not sure I agree with every move Assayas makes, if it's the 'right' one, but this film is really quite stunning, shocking. There are so few films I've seen that seem like they were made... now.
There's an interesting question as to how commercial this film is. Assayas' style and topic seem to fit modern norms of popularity (fast, twisty, obscene, joggly camera, anti-aesthetic at times), but is this a coincidence more than anything? Frankly, the plot is completely baffling, but this is important... but why?
As an idea of the dark heart' of suburbia, I have to say the end is a lot more concrete and, for me, powerful, than Lynch's abstract fantasies, though Assayas does not, and does not try to, have the nearly classical framing etc that Lynch has. I couldn't call it beauty (though there is undoubtedly some in the images). This seems more like an investigation of perception, of what it's like to live now. In that sense, it's Godard influenced, all the more so as, forty years after the period of Godard I'm thinking of, it looks so different (the world has changed). This film is experienced; and as quite something.