We might chuckle over it now, but a decade ago the "e-book revolution" seemed a done deal. The Kindle was fresh on the market, the iPad soon to join, and newspapers were preparing to go full digital and report exclusively on Twitter — or so The Guardian joked in an April Fool's Day ruse.
Hatched from such ballyhooed fears, Non-Fiction turns the bedside vigil for paper into a surprisingly jaunty comedy of manners, as writer-director Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper) returns to his career's inquisitive, poignant through line: the tension of time passing; the melancholy creak of old worlds collapsing and then rising anew.
Tentatively embracing the winds of change, Alain (Guillaume Canet), the well-groomed publisher of a prestigious literary institution, has hired the young and alluring Laure (Christa Theret) to head the company's "digital transition".
Dwindling sales mean they must adapt, and this Faustian temptress says the future is written in electronic ink.
Meanwhile, Alain doesn't want to publish the latest novel by his long-time author Leonard (Vincent Macaigne) who is peddling more of the same old schtick. The rather gormless technophobe, unaware of the online hordes baying for his blood, just happens to be having an affair with Alain's wife Selena (Juliette Binoche), an actor in a popular cop series that has admirers stopping her in the street.
From Cold Water (1994) to Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Assayas's best films have a charm that feels off-hand and accidental — qualities that are sensationally on display here in the opening, as a perfunctory lunch between writer and publisher becomes a twitchy game of cat-and-mouse intrigue.
As they both scramble to keep pace with, and make sense of, the times, the scene establishes the mood of the film.
Also, its form: a non-stop flood of words, captured with workmanlike vigour by in-demand cinematographer Yorick Le Saux (Little Women; High Life).
Without any texting ghosts, or grand set pieces to break up the chatter, the film stays boxed up inside the plush Parisian offices, dinner parties and bistros of this upper-crust milieu.
Alarm bells ring though whenever the talk switches to publishing in the digital age. Lines are hauled out from every cobwebbed and already redundant think-piece of the last decade — the dizzying rise of e-books, celebrity bloggers, "smug critics" vs algorithms, adult colouring books, and post-truth, i.e. the Oxford Dictionary's "word of the year" for 2016.
Someone actually says "Tweets are modern-day haiku".
Things get fun, though, when the philosophical debates spill into the world. The characters are given the space to test and trample over the nonsense they've just spouted, taking circuitous routes to arrive at back-door truths and outing themselves as being just as blindly confused as the rest of us.
For Alain and Selena, the sense of disorientation that accompanies a world rewiring itself is mirrored neatly as they both stray from the marital bed.
It's a pleasure to see Assayas back again with Binoche (whose star was launched by Rendez-vous, the 1985 Andre Techine drama that Assayas co-penned). She's clearly relishing the role which — even more than the slippery identity games of Clouds of Sils Maria — allows her to goof about.
There is something very funny about watching Juliette Binoche dodge explosions in police gear while making the hit show (wittily titled Collusion), or later deadpanning her way through a meta-namedrop scene that tickles at the film's chin-stroking facade.
Equally ludicrous is the suggestion of her character's affair with Leonard, who has the flustered presence of a hamster and, judging by his careless student-like appearance, probably bad breath.
Staying on theme, Leonard is a purveyor of autofiction, a recent trendy term linked to writers of thinly veiled autobiography such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk.
He disguises his sexual affairs so poorly that not even his partner Valerie (Nora Hamzawi), the devoted assistant to a lefty politician, is fooled.
"You lie only to me," she says. "The truth is in your books."
As he ineptly squirms his way through a radio interview and barely survives a public appearance in a bookshop, his total lack of self-awareness gifts us some of the most droll moments in Assayas's long career since Jean-Pierre Leaud's nutty mutterings in the would-be vampire flick Irma Vep (1996) — another ecstatic blurring of art and life.
Equally, any suggestion that Assayas is a neutral observer of the shifting landscape is resisted by his film.
Naturally, it makes us ponder the endangered place of cinema too.
Shot mostly on grainy Super 16mm, it knowingly — but not unsympathetically — inhabits the world of a vanishing middle class, the sort who can off-the-cuff quote Mallarme, or discuss Bergman as they roll out of bed.
A retiring cultural elite has figured in Assayas's elegiac films before, including the Limoges porcelain factory of Sentimental Destinies (2000) or the objets d'art that anchor the stunning Summer Hours (2008), sent to gather dust in the museum after a mother passes away.
But Non-Fiction movingly suggests some things are worth holding onto.
As the delightfully serpentine film rather conventionally comes to a head, it tenderly reaffirms the relationships — to art, ideas, and other people — that give some sense of shape and meaning to human lives.
Yet much like the hidden toothpick in Paul Verhoeven's Elle (2016), another sly satire of the French bourgeoisie, uncomfortable questions remain buried inside its melt-in-your-mouth layers.
The final scene breaks out of the city and the two couples luxuriate in the shock of open space by Selena and Alain's seaside holiday home. Gurrumul's song Gopuru serenades on the soundtrack, the first piece of music that is heard in the film.
For once, a chance to have some peace and quiet.
If that all sounds like a lot of silly navel-gazing, well, maybe it is.
As one character says: "These are narcissistic times. What can we do?"
Non-Fiction is available for digital purchase and DVD May 6.
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2020-05-05 20:30:31Z
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