The corporate espionage stuff, involving a French company negotiating for the rights to distribute Japanese animated pornography, eventually devolves into something altogether more cerebral and abstract as Assayas manipulates not just the language of conventional narrative film but the syntax of porn, the Internet, and video games. This is a kind of companion piece to Irma Vep, the 1996 comic inside-moviemaking picture that is Assayas’s best-known work stateside; as in Vep, images and their manufacture are a big thematic concern here. Another, tougher theme is the dislocation of consciousness that’s a side effect of a culture that craves sensation above all things (the businesspeople who populate demonlover’s dramatis personae—expertly portrayed by a scintillating cast that includes Connie Nielsen, Chloë Sevigny, and Gina Gershon—seem not only to be porn marketers, but compulsive porn consumers as well). I call this an art film, but it’s a very specific kind of art film; the picture’s system of signification, in many cases, has more in common with, say, Marcel Duchamp’s magnificent but initially confounding The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even than it does with a postneoclassical narrative painting like Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. This led one particularly brain-dead critic on the Internet to bitch that the movie offered no characters “to root for.” I understand that for a lot of moviegoers the whole rooting business is central to the appeal of cinema. I’m not one of them; and if you’re more into ruminating than rooting, check this out.