FILMS OF THE MONTH
56 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
Reviewed by Erika Balsom
The double plotline, braiding heterosexual
romance with a second narrative intrigue, usually
pertaining to work, is a cornerstone of classical
Hollywood. It marries private and public life,
staging their happy union in a single climax,
resolving all problems in the nick of time. Olivier
Assayas might seem an unlikely candidate to
resuscitate this construction today, but Non-Fiction
- tellingly titled Doubles vies in the original French
- does exactly that, moving between a garrulous
account of the crisis of literary publishing in the
digital age and the adulterous lives of members of
the creative class. Rather than any lazy lapse into
formula, though, this return to classical structure
- a return that is at the same time a radical revision
- echoes the film’s main thematic preoccupation:
namely, how the old must change and adapt if it
is to keep pace with the new. Holding persistence
in one hand and mutation in the other, Assayas
remakes the double plotline for an age when
work and life are indistinguishable, monogamy
is a fiction and algorithms determine culture.
Non-Fiction’s work plot is set primarily within
the world of literature. The central character, Alain
(Guillaume Canet), is an editor at a venerable
publishing house; with the help of the younger
Laure (Christa Théret), the head of digital
transition, with whom he is having an affair, he
talking points also risks becoming tiresome. If
these people are so cultivated, so intelligent, why
have I heard it all before? In the hands of another
director, this might be an ironic commentary
on the banality of bourgeois pontification,
but Assayas plays it straight and sincere.
Contrary to all the talky talk about e-books and
tablets, Non-Fiction’s other plot – pertaining not
to work, but to life, and specifically the life of the
straight bourgeois couple – is a story of the unsaid.
Alain is not the only one to stray: his partner
Selena (Juliette Binoche) has been sleeping with
one of his authors, Léonard (Vincent Macaigne),
for six years. Whether Alain knows about this
remains unclear; what is clear is that if he knows,
and he might, it is never discussed outright.
Complete candour rarely arrives, and when
it does, as in a conversation between Léonard
and his partner Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), it is
deemed unnecessary, undesirable. Unlike the
vociferous pronouncements about the fate
awaiting literature when profit is king and life
lived online, the amorous entanglements of Non-
Fiction are filled with non-disclosure, marked by
a reticence that strikingly inverts the work plot’s
loquaciousness. Taken together, the film’s two
narrative strands point to how different private
communication is from public pronouncement,
redeeming somewhat the occasionally
tedious discourse on the future of the book by
making it more than just zeitgeisty palaver.
Non-Fiction refreshingly avoids any moralising
about its characters’ mostly hidden infidelities,
seeing these as an inevitable part of long-term
partnerships – and even as something that allows
those partnerships to function. Joan Didion
famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in
order to live.” Assayas proposes that, actually,
attempts to tame the beast of technological change.
This narrative strand is not only the domain of
writing, but of speech too: the film is full of long
discussions in which every opinion you have
ever heard about the impact of digitisation on
cultural production is mooted. The internet will
save literature, the internet will kill literature;
it is a democratising utopia, it is an anarchic
incubator of post-truth politics; blogs are the
future, blogs are worthless; the critic is dead, the
critic is reborn as a Twitter aphorist. I could go on.
Although the film is mostly unconcerned with
taking sides on these issues, references to the
philosopher Theodor Adorno, the novelist Thomas
Bernhard and the poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé
are sprinkled throughout, firmly situating its
characters as individuals of class privilege, for
whom a notion of Bildung – self-cultivation –
remains fundamental, whether it is to be pursued
through print or Kindle. Watching these voluble
characters lay out their respective opinions about
the internet is amusing, and will surely figure
as a curious time-capsule for viewers in years to
come, though the rehearsal of so many well-worn
Stories we tell: Juliette Binoche as Selena and Guillaume Canet as her partner Alain in Olivier Assayas’s comic tale of infidelity in the internet age
Watching these characters
lay out their opinions about
the internet is amusing, and
will surely figure as a curious
time-capsule in years to come
France 2017
Director Olivier Assayas
Certificate 15 107m 19s
Non-Fiction
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
FOTM, 5
