‘Non-Fiction’ Review: Sex Comedy Disguised as Tech Treatise, or Vice Versa?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/movies/non-fiction-review.html

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During my first viewing of Olivier Assayas’s “Non-Fiction” — sometime last year, it must have been — I was a little puzzled about exactly when the story was supposed to be taking place. Was it right now, or now-ish or at some point in the recent past?

The main topic of conversation among the film’s culturally sophisticated, economically privileged characters is the impact of digital technology on media and the arts, literature in particular. The movie follows two Parisian couples in which the husbands are connected to the world of publishing. Alain (Guillaume Canet) is an editor, and Léonard (Vincent Macaigne) is a novelist. They meet for lunch and the topic of blogging comes up, as it does later at a dinner party, which made me think it must be 2005 or so. That’s when blogs were a thing, right? But maybe it’s different in France.

Other conversations touch on the rise of e-books, which maybe happened a little later. But everyone in the movie seems to have at least one smartphone, and Twitter and other social media platforms are mentioned from time to time. So are “le streaming,” “post-truth” and “fake news” (using the English words). Also “autofiction,” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “The White Ribbon,” a movie that won at Cannes in 2009. No political or other news events that might provide some kind of chronological orientation are cited.

I’ve come to believe that this confusion, this feeling of scrambling through an indeterminate, unstable present, is part of the film’s point. Alain, Léonard and others in their circle are preoccupied with — and have varying professional stakes in — the enormous changes that have already happened or are just about to happen. Alain is married to Selena (Juliette Binoche), an actress on a popular television series. Léonard’s wife, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), works for a socialist politician. Their jobs, like their husbands, are in flux. Whether with grim resignation, shrugging amusement or evangelical zeal, everyone declares that everything is different, everything is new.

Now and then, someone will demur: “But some things don’t change.” The second time I saw this witty, intelligent, sometimes cryptic movie — all synonyms for “un film d’Olivier Assayas” — those were the things I noticed. It’s easy to get so caught up in what these highly articulate people are saying (especially when you’re reading subtitles) that you don’t always notice what they’re doing.

In the vast majority of scenes, Assayas stages his arguments about the digital future in bars, restaurants and cafes, over informal dinners or hasty breakfasts. Or else, a bit less often, in stretches of pre- or postcoital discourse. People almost always meet at table or in bed, and in one case both at once, thanks to hotel room service. (The frites look delicious.) There are maybe 10 minutes out of 108 that don’t involve the immediate prospect of eating, drinking or sex. That’s what doesn’t change. This is a French movie.

The original French title of “Non-Fiction” means “Double Lives,” and it captures the existential split that afflicts Valérie, Selena, Léonard and Alain. They dwell in a virtual world of data, social networks and endless quantification, a world that feeds their appetites for abstraction and disputation. But of course they also have other appetites.

Either this is a comedy of adultery disguised as a meditation on the future of civilization, or the reverse. It’s pretty good fun either way, though it’s also very much a symptom of the condition it diagnoses, namely the profound complacency of the cultural elite (in France, but of course not only in France). Léonard exercises the novelist’s prerogatives of narcissism and self-pity. He publishes barely disguised accounts of his own erotic adventures, including with Selena, who wonders if her cop-show gig is somehow beneath her. Alain, who can argue three sides of any question, drifts into an affair with Laure (Christa Théret), a young digital disrupter hired by his company to shake it up.

The fact that Valérie, who works in politics, is the least cynical, most ethical player in this game counts as a sly joke. Her job, which takes her away from Paris, gestures toward a dimension of reality that lies beyond the hermetic concerns of the others. Not that “Non-Fiction” really goes there. That hermeticism is both its subject and its method. There’s no way for Assayas to establish any satirical distance from his characters. His intimate, streamlined shooting style and the unaffected precision of the performances places us squarely in their midst.

This may be insufferable or delightful or — this was my experience — both. These people are exasperating! Half of what they say is utter nonsense! But to react this way is to recognize them, and therefore to be implicated their vanity, their duplicity and their self-delusion. It’s not always a comfortable position to be in. It’s a little too real.