Demonlover

Something struck me the other day. A crow was walking close by in the beach pecking at things in the sand, it hopped twice then swooped up to some trees nearby. It was a marvelous show of graceful gliding that had me wondering: what would it be for this to be not a graceful birdplay but your own standard perception?

In the human understanding of space, it crossed a lot of distance with what seemed like considerable effort, but from the bird's effortlessness of movement it must have been as casual as a human gesture of my hand, which means its capacity to do that must come with wholly new experiences of space and time. If I could glide in a second to a tree 10 feet away, the object ceases to be 'far'.

So isn't perception not a fixed property but a relationship to space? And as that relationship, something we can cultivate. In cinematic terms, we can say that the fast moving POV from a car has been opened to us and made available as vision because someone first traveled in a car and that is when it first appeared, though the capacity was there.

Not waxing here. What I mean to say is that I'm drawn to filmmakers who wonder about these things, our placement and intuitions of space, how experience flows from them, and after this film I will always welcome Assayas in my house just as I do Kar Wai and (occasionally) Ferrara and Cronenberg.

We have here the cinematic portrait of a woman in a world in motion, a world of deceit, sex, betrayal. These tropes often packaged in the film noir and sexual thriller narratives are there so that we can have a certain motion pivotal to the thing, visual and narrative. So that we can be hooked into a heightened version of a world we know, one of competiteveness, desires and urges, and dragged along.

It's an interesting story, with rival companies vying for control of the lucrative anime market, and lots of deal-breaking and espionage. You can watch it for just its intricate noir weave of sexual identity; Assayas just loves his fiction too much to use it as a mere hanger for ideas.

What captivates me though is the creation of visual space. Assayas, if you have seen any of his films, is not as accomplished as others, he does not take an eternity to place things in just the right light and symbolic order. He rushes in to create a perceptive experience. Like others of his films, this is messy and disorienting because in his view, we are, our life.

So it matters that Assayas refuses to make a stylish film, to turn any of this into lifestyle ads, what dull Refn would do. It matters that a crucial point in the film of exposed identity happens with murder, unconsciousness and being filmed. The film, in its best spots, is all about this: intense urges in the viewing space between intense hyper- alertness and blurred mind.

I'll keep this with me for just the Tokyo segment. It is hard to be visually uninteresting in Tokyo but watch how marvelous Assayas is; the anchors at this point in the story are uncertain, the what-it-all-means yet, but the rush of visual Tokyo seduces and overwhelms, so when he drags to create visual flows, the anchors snap, it throws us hovering outside the story to find a lonely woman as the perceptive world around her throbs and palpitates.

It's all in that shot in the cab, her tired face framed in the rear view mirror surrounded by unfocused, rushing currents of world.