I thought I was going to see 13 year-olds doing whippits

Mistaking the time for the movie Thirteen, I said fuck it and went to see Demonlover, the new movie by Olivier Assayas. I thought it was going to be an Irma Vep-ish bore, but I was very wrong.

It's a bizarre combination of Irreversible, Dirty Pretty Things, 8MM and Lost in Translation (except instead of lying around in hotel rooms blankly staring at wierd Japanese talk shows the characters lie around watching wierd Japanese porn with all unmentionables scrambled by the Puritans who founded our fair nation, resulting in even more bizarre visual imagery). For those of you Brown MCMers who read Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" might as well have been the treatment for the script, and trust me she gets punished. Scopophilia is taken to the level of anime porn, except cartoon sex is reduced to a blob of moving squares. Where would America be without the MPAA?

Anyway, until the last five minutes I liked it a lot, and I hadn't heard anything about it. The clothes in the film are gorgeous, Sonic Youth does the soundtrack and it's really good, and the characters speak French, Japanese, Spanish and English. The scenes in Tokyo make me suspect Sophia Coppola saw something of this film before she started shooting Lost In Translation, which in comparison feels silly. Not that I don't prefer that sometimes. This movie made me scared and depressed. Because in the beginning I kind of related to the main character and then she gets fucked up in a gender-specific way, a narrative trope that always makes me upset. I think in the future I'll avoid movies about smut porn.