It’s rarely wise to begin a critique of a film by presenting a directorial statement of intent, but in this case, I think it’s both warranted and instructive, largely because it diverges so wildly from what I got out of the experience of watching it.
So...here’s Olivier Assayas on Non-Fiction (or Double vies, which is a much better title): "Our world is in constant change. It has always been. The issue is our ability to keep an eye on that flux, to understand what is truly at stake, and then adapt, or not. After all, that is what politics and opinion are about. The digitisation of our world and its reduction to algorithms is the modern vector of a change that unrelentingly confuses and overwhelms us. Digital economy infringes rules, and often laws. Moreover it questions whatever seemed most stable and solid in society and the reality around us, only to dissolve on mere contact. Doubles vies is not about analysing the workings of the new economy. Its more modest intent is to observe how those questions beleaguer us, personally, emotionally, and sometimes humorously."
I’ll concede that last sentence somewhat, in that Non-Fiction is sometimes humorous, particularly in a scene where a recollection of a blow job during a screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens becomes fictionalised so that it takes place during a viewing of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon instead - it’s a lovely moment of lightness that pricks the gauche pretension of flailing author Léonard (Vincent Macaigne). But I’m getting ahead of myself…
The first hour of Non-Fiction is eye-rollingly self-satisfied and smug, as we are subjected to an unremitting stream of irksome verbiage about the relative merits of print and digital technologies. We hear from authors and publishers and readers and PR people and all manner of exclusively white and middle-class Parisians who say things like "Tweets are modern-day haiku", even though real people just don’t talk like this at all.
Publisher Alain (Guillaume Canet) - he’s the one who said that wearisome thing about tweets - is married to actress Selena (Juliette Binoche) who is getting fed up of playing a cop (she often protests that she’s actually a "crisis management expert", not a cop) on Season 3 of the hit show Collusion. All that acclaim must be a real drag, because Selena also joins in during those excruciating digressions about Print! and Digital! and How We Communicate and Consume Media and Ideas and Language in the 21st Century! Anyway…
Loads of people are cheating on their partners with other people who are cheating on their partners, or just with people who are rampant careerists who also like to expound at length about Technology! and The World Is Changing, Isn’t It, Have You Noticed?
People banging on about this stuff for an hour is not great storytelling. It’s a cinema screen blasting Hot Takes and Think Pieces and interminable Twitter threads at you. The print vs digital discussions already feel wildly out-dated. It’s a film arguing about the waning relevance of certain cultural artifacts, raising questions that already feel vaguely immaterial, housed within an already decaying cultural artifact. Pop has eaten itself, excreted itself out, and is sitting down for a second plateful. Thankfully, the low-key drama that begins to develop in the second hour is far more engaging than the shallow narrowband intellectual chin-stroking of the first hour, and as soon as Non-Fiction dials back on that and loosens up enough to let the character interactions and revelations unfold, it improves considerably, and by the end I was surprised by how much I was enjoying myself with it.
Shot on Super 16mm and reminiscent of Assayas’ Summer Hours (although this is ultimately more playful), Non-Fiction is in cinemas and on demand in the UK from Friday 18th October 2019.