The French director’s latest effort ponders the dualisms of modern life, and of art.
‘We have to change so that everything can remain the same,” wrote Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard. Slightly less majestic mammals confront slightly less tectonic change in Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction, which considers the struggle to keep book publishing alive in the age of texting and tweeting (and “blogging,” which apparently is still a thing in France).
Non-Fiction is being billed as a comedy of manners for the hyper-digital age, but I’ll have to disqualify it from the comedy category on the grounds that it delivers no laughs. Well, there’s one laugh, but it’s unintentional: When a French politician who has been caught with a gay hooker worries about preserving his public reputation, he says that to the public, “beyond reproach means monogamous, straight, family guy.” His adviser corrects him: “No one is asking that much.” This is France, after all.
The films of writer-director Assayas (such as Clouds of Sils Maria, from 2014, and Personal Shopper, from 2016) are subtle to the point of inviting varied interpretations, making his oeuvre a sort of job-creation program for critics, who in return dote on him. I’m not sure being hard to pin down is admirable, but as usual his latest effort rewards attentive viewers. It’s pleasingly tricksy and loaded with subtext.
A lot of that subtext is about texts. Non-Fiction, whose French title “Doubles Vies” (Double Lives) is more apt, takes place in a Parisian publishing sphere in which a successful editor, Alain (Guillaume Canet), is trying to grapple with the digitization of everything. One of his previously successful authors, Léonard (played by Vincent Macaigne as an unmade bed of a man) is a writer of racy autobiographical novels about his adventures between the sheets. Léonard no longer seems in touch with the zeitgeist, and so Alain gently rejects his new manuscript. Literature, Alain thinks, is turning away from the novel and toward bite-sized quips and epigrams, although Alain remains enough of a traditionalist to be startled by some of the proposals of his new digital adviser, a willowy blonde played by Christa Theret.
None of this seems to have much to do with Alain’s wife, Selena (Juliette Binoche). She’s the star of a TV cop drama, which leads to a (sort of) running gag: People ask her how she likes playing a strong lady cop, and she fires back that her character isn’t a cop at all but a “crisis-management expert.” (She’s the kind of crisis-management expert who storms apartment buildings in a bulletproof vest labeled “POLICE” and guns down shady dudes in hallways.)
This being a French movie, there is much philandering. And this being a French movie, the cheating gets handled in a very particular way. Discussion of the matter stays on the moral and emotional level of “Can you believe this guy I’m married to? He left the toilet seat up again.” When people have heated discussions in the film, they tend to be about things like whether blogging counts as writing.
The bed-hopping on the surface of the film is of less interest to Assayas, though, than a pair of dueling dualisms: the split between our digital and analogue selves, and the split between our true selves and how we come across in works of fiction (such as films). The writer who presents his books as novels, even though they are barely disguised bits of memoir, stands revealed by a text, which in turn is not a text but a picture that refers back to how a detail was changed in one of his books. Tech is rerouting his life even as he resists it. The editor who pushes for more digitization of his field discovers the value in going in a surprisingly analog direction: publishing coloring books for adults. The meta-fictional element gets stepped up when the characters start talking about Juliette Binoche, as Binoche herself sits there playing Selena. Selena allows that she has Binoche’s email address but cannot share it because “that’s not done.”
What are we to make of such mischief? It’s debatable. Assayas’s films are made not so much to be watched as re-watched. This puts him in stylistic conflict with an era in which people can hardly make it through a whole movie once without glancing at their phones. Maybe acknowledging what’s in the air while sticking to his style is his way of taking The Leopard’s advice.