Telluride '18: Non-Fiction

**½/****
starring Guillaume Canet, Juliette Binoche, Vincent Macaigne, Nora Hamzawi
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Walter Chaw The questions asked in and by Olivier Assayas's Non-Fiction are slippery and at times satisfying for that. This is his Hong Sang-Soo following a pair of Apichatpong Weerasethakuls (though he would say his films owe a bigger debt to Bresson)--a movie, in other words, involving the intricacies of relational dynamics, shot on what appears to be a shoestring and a lark over a long weekend among friends. Probably it's what one of his characters calls "auto-fiction," a blurred line between memoir and pure fiction, with the tension being that maybe there's not much of a difference after all between what's true and what's made up in the pursuit of truth. It's one of those movies that seems like a defense of concept, a response or an invitation to conversation for critics. (Assayas himself was one, once upon a time.) Even more, the picture suggests an auto-critical confession of sorts, yet I'm not sure of what. Past or present infidelities? A declaration that he's found peace at last? An apologia for indiscretions and a pathway to a more authentic life? Whatever Non-Fiction is, it's maybe just a little too clever for its own good.

The "auto-fictional" author in question is Leonard (Vincent Macaigne), scruffy, unkempt, and controversial in his work for using obvious real-life analogues as inspiration for his sometimes-nasty tell-all "novels" ("It's the only way I can write," he tells his girlfriend/wife, Valeria (Nora Hamzawi)), even though he knows it'll get him in trouble with the people he "outs." One such individual is the woman with whom he's currently having an affair, Selena (Juliette Binoche), wife of dapper publisher Alain (Guillaume Canet), who himself is cheating with his publishing house's head of digital transition, Laure (Chrita Theret). This tangled web is set on a structure involving lengthy debates about the long-term viability of books over digital media; whether young people read more or less now; and what constitutes "authenticity" in the public vs. the private spheres. In that pursuit, Valeria is a campaign manager for a progressive "socialist" candidate in some upcoming French election who has been caught in a prostitution sting that Valeria, idealistic to the point of being an irritant, is forced to help conceal. Selena stumps for Leonard's latest memoir with Alain, although Alain has started to find Leonard's exposés to be increasingly unpleasant. In the film's best scene, Valeria, after a horrific day at work and a contentious dinner party with pricks, interrupts a fight with Leonard with a sudden question concerning his fidelity and love for her.

It sounds madcap, but it's not. Non-Fiction is instead a largely sedate puzzle-box of coy insinuations. There are so many references to itself as a thinly-veiled autobiography that it's impossible to wonder if Binoche, star of three recent Assayas features, isn't now his Kim Min-Hee. Maybe that's the point. It's a film about patience and discovery that is ostensibly about how attention spans now tend towards blogs rather than books. It looks self-effacing when you consider that maybe Assayas has cast as his alter ego lout Leonard, but then you remember that Assayas was in a relationship with Mia Hansen-Løve starting when she was 17 and he was 43 (though he says they didn't "get together" until she was 20 and he was 46; no word if he cheated on then-wife Maggie Cheung with Hansen-Løve), thus making his analogue the dashing Alain, who beds his much-younger underling. For Laure's part, she's painted as a cool opportunist among whose main interests is sex according to her boss, Alain. Once you attach a real-world counterpart to any of these characters, though, there's Assayas misdirecting and pontificating. He alternates self-flagellation at the idea that he could hurt people with his work with self-aggrandizement that art is not "corrupt" and for profit, but has as its only raison d'être art itself. In the end, Non-Fiction reveals that books are actually one artifact of physical media on the upswing, buggering predictions of its demise at the hands of e-books and tablets. In other words, if there's meaning in it, what Non-Fiction really is is a triumphant justification of its own existence. Frankly, it would have been better with a ghost.