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Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas, 2018)
🕑 Added 2019-07-24 20:47:06 +0000 UTC
The French title of Non-Fiction is Doubles vies, and the fact that there are essentially two unrelated titles for this film indicates just how fundamentally incoherent it is as a text. There's a certain tedium involved in watching Assayas toggle back and forth between a standard-issue, echt-French tale of urbane intellectuals engaging in extramarital affairs, on the one hand, and a barely theatricalized TED Talk about the crisis of our digital future on the other.
The couplings and deceptions are schematic and cliché, almost like Assayas doing Woody Allen doing Rohmer. Literary editor Alain (Guillaume Canet) is married to TV actress Selena (Juliette Binoche). But Selena is having an affair with Léonard (Vincent Macaigne), a prominent author in Alain's stable. Léonard's partner Valérie (Nora Hamzawi) gives all of her time to her politician boss (Nicolas Bouchaud), implying an affair is happening there, although in fact it isn't. Alain, meanwhile, has a fling with Laure (Christa Théret), the new head of digital production at the publishing house. We briefly learn that Laure is cheating on her own girlfriend (Olivia Ross).
Alongside all this patent nonsense, the various characters discuss the future of publishing, whether books themselves have a future, if they will be supplanted by Kindle, if criticism has a place in the new algorithm-driven economy, and if humanistic values in the larger sense are being wiped out in favor of monetized technocracy. There are a few group chats about these questions at parties, and an actual colloquium scene. But mostly these discussions are framed as contests between Alain, as the defender of Assayasian / European cultural heritage, and Laure as the young voice of Google, Amazon, and Twitter.
This would all be simply bad drama, were it not for the fact that Alain repeatedly puts his dick in Laure. This is comically offensive, a cheap way to demonstrate the cultural establishment's flirting with the big bad enemy of Big Data, conveniently embodied by a lithe blonde with perky tits. "The future" = money / pussy = "seduction" = creating new but unpredictable life. I guess I should be glad that Alain didn't knock Laure up, but then again, Non-Fiction does conclude with a pregnancy, so Assayas made an only slightly better choice.
When you think about it, Non-Fiction is a film that has a lot of smart ideas, but its maker obviously thought he needed a bunch of equally dumb ones in order to put them across. And if that's the case, then the cultural battle he's concerned with has clearly already been lost.
