Demonlover, Olivier Assayas

An engrossing, beautiful nightmare about global capitalism. The film skips over coherent plot and character development and presents a fantasy of smeared shells -- the surfaces of cars, buildings, office spaces and people representing transnational capitalism. The details of the plot concern, loosely, an office rivalry during a financing negotiation and struggle between pornographic websites. The film creates a hermetically sealed, accountability-free world of treacherous (female) high finance middle managers struggling for domination, all of whom, it turns out, are replaceable by the nearly invisible powers that be. The pointed disregard for getting the details across from what appears to be a worked-out script intensifies the nightmare-like quality, as it does in David Lynch’s Dune. There is a brief, bafflingly ham-handed ending shot. The visuals and atmosphere are continuously engrossing and occasionally repulsive. The action scenes are so blurred and jumbled they are almost completely abstract. Sonic Youth soundtrack.