My Weekend with Olivier Assayas

For the second year in a row, the annual French Film Festival held at Shangri-la cinemas included a retrospective of a popular French cinema artist. Last year the featured artist was actress Sandrine Bonnaire; this year the spotlight was on director Olivier Assayas. Seven of his films were included in the retrospective, two of which had already been screened in past editions of the Festival. This weekend I was able to see three of the films, including two of his best-known and most polarizing.

Sentimental Destinies (Les Destinees Sentimentales; 2000) is the most conventional of the three films. In fact, it seems determinedly old fashioned in its evocation of French provincial life in the early part of the twentieth century. The story revolves around Jean Barnery, the heir to the Barney porcelain dynasty and the unfortunate choices he makes throughout his life. While the three hour length and the slow, deliberate pacing may render it unwatchable for many people (in fact, at the screening I attended, there were a lot of walkouts before the movie ended), but those who are willing to be immersed in the world portrayed by the filmmakers may find themselves rewarded in the end.

Irma Vep (1996) is a film-within-a-film and revolves around the making of a new version of a classic silent film serial involving a sexy cat burglar. Maggie Cheung appears as herself, who has been cast as the lead of the film. Arriving in Paris late due to delays in the shooting of another film, she finds herself in the midst of a chaotic production headed by a clearly disconnected and distracted director who seems not that interested in the film he’s making. While the movie is intermittently entertaining in providing a backstage view of the actual nuts and bolts of the filmmaking process, it ultimately seems to be the kind of film it is implicitly critiquing – a pretentious movie that is made only so the director can express himself and is aimed only for an elite audience of intellectuals.

Demonlover (2002) is the most problematic of the three films, a highly polarizing film. The film revolves around Diane, played by Connie Nielsen, who is helping broker a deal for exclusive distribution between the Demonlover site, which shows Japanese porn, and a content provider. However, it turns out she is actually a spy for a competitor site, Mangatronics, whose ultimate aim is to scuttle the deal as a matter of survival. She also discovers the existence of the Hellfire Club, a torture porn site with ties to Demonlover. The movie features a fractured narrative that completely breaks down by the third act, leading to an uncertain conclusion, albeit one that nails the movie’s theme of growing desensitization to violence due to increasing exposure to images of violence.