Non-Fiction (7/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 107 minutes.

R.

Writer/director Olivier Assayas (who also directed another film I liked a lot, Clouds of Sils Maria, 2014, also with Juliette Binoche, one of his co-stars here) tells the story of traditional artists like writer Léonard Spiegel (Vincent Macaigne) and publisher Alain Danielson (Guillaume Canet) being dragged yelling and screaming into a digital world they don’t really understand. And he populates it with very talented people as Canet and Macaigne are also writers and directors in real life as well as actors.

Léonard’s novel blurs the line between fiction and fact. Alas, it is about characters who are recognizable and therein lies the rub. Since Léonard is having an extra-marital affair with an actress, Selena (Binoche), who just happens to be married to Alain, and the novel seems pretty much a roman à clef about Léonard’s life, tension mounts.

This picture in time of the bohemian intelligentsia of the Parisian publishing world is filled with convincing, realistic, thought-provoking slice of life dialogue. The characters’ incestuous infidelity is treated with a wink and a nod.

Also involved are  Léonard’s wife, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), and Alain’s new technical assistant, Laure (Christa Théret), with whom Alain has an affair (surprise, surprise! this is a French film, after all) who tries to explain the new world to him (and us).

If you like French films, and I do (of course we only get the very best over here), this is a good one, even though it is all talk. There really is no plot or story. It is just a picture of a segment of French society at this point in time. The conversations between Alain and Laure about the digital revolution are so esoteric they might be over the heads of a normal audience. The other conversations are frank and stimulating. In French.