The latest from French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of
Sils Maria,” “Personal Shopper”), “Non-Fiction” is a chatty, breezily
entertaining comedy of manners when isn’t getting bogged down by its characters’
self-conscious meditations on life and culture in the digital age.
At its heart the film is a bedroom farce, and its French
title “Doubles vies” (translating to “Double Lives”) is a reference to the Parisian
intellectuals at its center, whose intertwining love lives and mutual
infidelities are the source of constant deceptions, both personally and
professionally.
Alain (Guillaume Canet) is a publisher struggling to keep his
esteemed company relevant in the constantly-shifting media landscape. His friend
Lรฉonard (Vincent Macaigne) is the author of not-quite-autobiographical
“auto-fiction” novels — really just salacious, thinly-veiled recountings of his
life and various affairs.
Alain has doubts about publishing Lรฉonard’s latest
manuscript, which focuses on the writer’s amorous relationship with a woman
named Xenia, claiming that it feels like more of the same. Unbeknownst to
Alain, Xenia’s character is actually based on his wife, Selena (Juliette
Binoche), an actress on a popular police procedural who’s been carrying on an
affair with Lรฉonard for years.
Naturally, Alain is having his own affair with his company’s
newly-hired head of “digital transition” (Christa Thรฉret), and who represents
an alluring yet terrifying new future. Meanwhile, Lรฉonard’s longtime
girlfriend, the idealistic Valรฉrie (Nora Hamzawi), works as the assistant to a
progressive politician and is perhaps the most level-headed and sane of the
bunch.
Over wine, food, and in post-coital conversations, the
characters wax on about the changing culture and the place of the written word
within it. They talk about politics, fake news, and the anesthetizing effects
of binge-watching television and adult coloring books.
Assayas has some fun poking at the pretensions of his
characters, and their conversations are sharply written with a lively,
free-flowing energy. But these discussions are not exactly new, and at a
certain point the characters start to feel like essays with mouths.
“Non-Fiction” is at its best when Assayas lets his characters
breathe. When they stop regurgitating talking points from whatever “New Yorker”
article was making the rounds circa the early 2010s, there’s something
affecting about their desire to fight the inevitable. And the suggestion that
all their fretting over the public’s changing tastes masks a real anxiety about
becoming irrelevant themselves.
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2019.
