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"Annie Hall for the American Pie crowd" seems to be the unspoken advertising mantra behind Anything Else -- the trailers and TV spots are deliberately playing down the Woody Allen marquee in favor of the audience appeal of its youthful leads, Christina Ricci and Jason Biggs. The strategy, like everything else in movies today, is geared toward box-office wealth: Allen's films have never been particularly profitable beyond his loyal, once-a-year art house followers, so the foregrounding of young blood may seem like a shrewd move after the grim numbers of, say, Hollywood Ending. The effect is doubly depressing, not just in the cynicism of the advertising (and, if Allen agreed to it, in his own lack of confidence), but also in the very staleness of the film itself. Now 67, Allen could be entering a whole new stage in his career -- age, with its accumulated life experiences, can bring more mellowness, confidence and understanding for an artist, along with an expansion of his art. Unfortunately, for Allen it has had the opposite effect -- over the decades, with rare exceptions, his themes and obsessions have shrunk his world to about two or three upper-scale Manhattan blocks. Repetition of concerns never crippled such artists as Yasujiro Ozu or Eric Rohmer, but with Allen it's been a matter less of variation than of lack of courage, of somebody too comfortable in a frozen persona to try things out. Anything Else plays like a laundry list of Woodyphernalia: relationship anxiety, zingy neurosis, asides to the camera, jokes about Auschwitz and art house patrons, fear of death, artistic pretension (quotes from Camus, jeez), vintage jazz, "God is dead," etc. Allen doesn't even bother to explore his themes anymore, he just leans on the viewer's recognition of them, and dressing them in Gen-Y garb doesn't make them any fresher. (Worse, the movie is not funny. A long comic sequence involving a newly bought rifle, to cite one example, fizzles as dismally as anything in Woody's entire oeuvre.) Biggs, moose-faced and passably fidgety, and the tantalizingly huge-eyed Ricci, both gifted and appealing young actors, obediently go through the motions of the director's paint-by-numbers scenario, him as an aspiring writer churning out bits for nightclub dwellers, her as a sort of updated Diane Keaton, a wannabe actress with tics and fears shooting out of her fingertips. Their rocky relationship provides the roadmap of the movie. Allen himself plays Biggs' paranoid mentor, and mercifully spares us a romance with a college-age dish this time around. Sourness could hardly have been the overall feeling Anything Else originally intended for its portrait of a youthful relationship, but it is the raison d'etre behind demonlover. Knee-deep in brutal perversion and here-and-now amorality (and thoroughly, gleefully self-conscious of it), it is a movie designed to rattle our postmodern cage. The narrative is basically a '60s spy thriller transplanted to the age of cutthroat Internet companies and animated Japanese pornography, with the genre's inherent cold-hearted nature logically heightened. The lurid, extraordinarily lucrative market of adult websites provides the battleground where two corporations will stop at nothing (including murder) to get the rights to a hot new product. Among the mannequins stalking each other is heartless, frostily gorgeous Connie Nielsen, who really should have played the Terminatrix in Ahnuld's last epic. Though hardly a heroine, she's the main focus of the story, first spotted aiding the kidnapping of an older executive and stealthily crippling her company from within for its rival's benefit. What begins as a simple sabotage scheme soon spirals into a web of sado-snuff sites, car chases, grotesque plot twists, and bouts with Chloe Sevigny (petulant and somnolent as ever) and growly Gina Gershon. For a while, the movie held me. While Allen's films are at best reasonably graceful illustrations of his screenplays, Assayas' burst with virtuosity. His feel for glitz and color, his sense of rhythms between and within scenes, keep things sizzling for the first hour or so. The film wraps itself inside the world of gory video games and Japanese jailbait manga, and it is as alive to their decadent charge as to their feelings of dread and cultural horror. Like in Assayas' marvelous earlier hit Irma Vep (1996), demonlover has a whirling cultural texture, with overlapping chats in French, English and Japanese casually sprinkled about. Assayas, however, has bigger fish to fry -- he wants to examine video games and pornography sites as the marketing of images, as symptoms of a cancerous culture, a capitalist society where the ugliest (and most profitable) ideas have found their ideal technological equivalents. An admirable goal, particularly today, when so many people are happy to merely accept the implications of pop images instead of questioning them. For all its ambition and self-reflexive mind games, however, the film gets muddier as it goes along; the more it twists, the more transparent its methods become, and the more diffuse the ideas get. By the time Nielsen is being chased by thugs while decked in a Catwoman bodysuit, demonlover has dissolved from critique to the thing it is criticizing.
Assayas settles for a disturbingly facile ironic finale, the kind that aims to open your eyes as it turns your stomach.
The film doesn't work, but it at least is setting out to address new ground. By contrast, Woody Allen's blatant creative
self-cannibalizing in Anything Else, even without close-ups of ravaged cartoon girls, is far more depressing.
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