A Cannes Film Festival premiere was the perfect way to bury a film like demonlover. Olivier Assayas’s latest bounces stunned gazes right back like the art-film equivalent of an haute couture model strutting the length of the runway (or up the red carpet)—an impossible object, frustrating in its cold, unattainable nonchalance. In a festival that uneasily shoves the sex and glamour of the high fashion world up against the most rarified of international art cinema (Femme Fatale’s Riviera centerpiece may have had an air of parody about it, but might just be more truthful about Cannes than most viewers realized), a film that draws attention to the seamier side of the systems of production, distribution, and reception that control the flow of cultural commodities must have elicited a twinge of unease from its audience. Demonlover features the very business that most viewers were there to complete, tossed onscreen, yet ratcheted up a notch—porn gets substituted for “art,” and the film’s true worth lies in how it shoots right to the heart of the second, more important, half of the commodity exchange equation. Wares will be wares; it’s how they move where things get interesting. On and offscreen, closing the deal is the elusive fetish object that displaces sex—participants know very well, but all the same…they keep coming back for more. Acknowledging the true subject underneath the alienating surface of demonlover would have been tantamount to acknowledging the essentially empty nature of the bulk of the Croisette’s transactions. What better place to diffuse its critique than in an event that pays lip service to its intents while undermining them at every turn?