FILMS OF THE MONTH
November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 57
happens during Michael Haneke’s The White
Ribbon (2009) instead of Star Wars: The Force
Awakens (2015), a fib that enables Léonard to
cast himself as both more discerning and more
scandalous. Like the intimate partnerships of Non-
Fiction, in Léonard’s autofiction, self-expression
is never unreservedly confessional. Truth bends
to the exigencies of the speaker. Several times,
Léonard is asked to confront the ethics of his
chosen form, and particularly the delicate matter
of how he serves up his real-life relationships for
public consumption. He shrugs off such concerns:
reality may be his currency, but fiction is his alibi.
True to the original French title’s invocation
of doubling, Non-Fiction is replete with mirroring.
Notably, though, its engagement with autofiction
never doubles back on Assayas’s own relationship
to his film. If the director has a proxy, it is not
Léonard, the somewhat pitiful merchant of real life,
but the sanguine Alain, who collects the opinions
of those around him and cites Ingmar Bergman, a
director for whom Assayas has great admiration.
When Laure asks him if he knows the Prince of
Salina’s words from the end of The Leopard, he does:
“Everything must change for things to stay as they
are.” In Non-Fiction, it is true of cinema, literature,
relationships. This attitude could be rejected as a
desperate conservatism. But aren’t there things we
want to keep? Non-Fiction feels breezy, but this is
a film in which, on multiple fronts, appearances
don’t tell the whole story. Beneath its apparent
lightness is something much thornier: a parable
of integrity, compromise and betrayal.
We’ll always have Paris: Selena with her lover Léonard, played by Vincent Macaigne
Paris, the present. Literary editor Alain lunches
with Léonard, an author whose books he has long
published. At the end of the meal, Alain reveals that
he will not be publishing Léonard’s next book, a work
of autofiction that includes a scene of adultery.
Alain’s partner Selena, a television actress, confides
to a colleague that she believes Alain is being
unfaithful. She is right: Alain is sleeping with his
employee Laure, the head of digital transition. Selena
too has been unfaithful, with Léonard; she is the
one who appears in his novel. Léonard confesses his
infidelity to his partner Valérie. Alain and Selena visit
Marc-Antoine, the owner of the publishing house,
who is thinking of selling to a telecoms company
because of disappointing e-book sales. By speaking
to Marc-Antoine’s family, who are fans of Léonard’s
books, Selena persuades Alain to publish his new
novel. Laure resigns to take a position in London, and
Selena breaks up with Léonard, making him promise
not to include her in future novels. Léonard and
Valérie visit Alain and Selena in Majorca. Alone after
dinner, Valérie tells Léonard she is pregnant – after
failed attempts at IVF and even though they have
not had much sex. He thanks her for not revealing to
Selena that she is in the book he is currently writing.
Produced by
Charles Gillibert
Written by
Olivier Assayas
Director of
Photography
Yorick Le Saux
Editor
Simon Jacquet
Art Director
François-Renaud
Labarthe
Sound
Nicolas Cantin
Daniel Sobrino
Aude Baudassé
Costume Designer
Jürgen Doering
©CG Cinéma, Vortex
Sutra, ARTE France
Cinéma, Playtime
Production
Companies
CG Cinema present
In co-production
with Vortex Sutra,
ARTE France
Cinéma, Playtime
With the
participation of
ARTE France,
Canal+, Cine+ and
of Cinécapital,
Cinéventure
3, Cofinova 14,
Indefilms 6, La
Banque Postale
Image 11, Manon
8, Sofitvciné 5
A CG Cinéma, Vortex
Sutra, ARTE France
Cinéma, Playtime
co-production in
association with
Lynk Investment
Trading Service
Construction
Company Ltd
With the
participation of
ARTE France,
Canal+, Ciné+, Ad
Vitam, Playtime,
Cinécapital,
Cinéventure
3, Cofinova 14,
Indefilms 6, La
Banque Postale
Image 11, Manon
8, Sofitvciné 5
With the support
of Cinémage 11
développement,
Indefilms Initiative
5 développement,
Soficinéma 13
développement
Executive Producer
Sylvia Barthet
Cast
Guillaume Canet
Alain Danielson
Juliette Binoche
Selena
Vincent Macaigne
Léonard Spiegel
Christa Théret
Laure d’Angerville
Nora Hamzawi
Valérie
Pascal Greggory
Marc-Antoine Rouvel
Dolby Digital
In Colour
[1.85:1]
Subtitles
Distributor
Curzon Artificial Eye
French theatrical title
Doubles vies
Credits and Synopsis
James Bell You could have set a story about
the effects of digitisation within almost
any creative industry. Why publishing?
Olivier Assayas It felt clearer with something as
simple as the written word. Movies are relatively
recent, a little over a century old; the written
word has been around much longer than that, so
when there’s a major sea change in our reading
habits, it runs much deeper. Also, I think the
digital transformation of cinema has already
happened, a while ago, and in my view it would
be much more difficult to describe in
a movie. But of course, it could
have been set in cinema – or
in plumbing, banking,
insurance... the digital
revolution has affected
all elements of society.
JB You’ve said you
didn’t have a clear
plan when you started
writing? Was exploring
the theme of digitisation
always there?
OA No, I didn’t know
where it was heading. I liked
the characters though, and
felt my way in. I wrote scene by
scene, and gradually it took shape on its own.
It was more about the relationship between
a publisher and a writer than the theme of
digitisation at first – exploring the creative
relationship, and how it can fade with time.
JB You must have been aware that the film’s
focus on digitisation and new technologies
risked it becoming a time capsule that people
might look back on with some amusement?
OA It was totally on my mind. Initially it was a
worry, but if you want to deal with change, you
can only do it at the level of the present. I
think people who watch this movie
[in the future] will watch it in
the same way as we do now
when we see people talk in a
phone box. I don’t think we
have difficulty in putting
ourselves back into a
different perspective in
time, because it always
relates to something that
is going on in any time,
which is the process of
change. I may be wrong, but
I think that because the film
is so anchored in its moment, it
will give it a universal meaning.
Q&A Olivier Assayas, director
equally, we tell our loved ones stories in order
to live. Alain and Selena seem to have a happy
enough relationship, even though many of their
interactions are pregnant with subtext, full of
instances when what is said is not quite what
is meant. In these scenes, and perhaps most
potently in the concluding conversation between
Léonard and Valérie, Assayas suggests it may be
wrong to assume that intimacy is best served by
complete honesty, that it is mistaken to expect
that we will always be most forthcoming with
those who are closest to us. Just as the art of
literature must go to bed with commerce to live
another day, so too does the survival of the film’s
romantic partnerships depend on polluting a
cherished ideal. When reality knocks, this sex
comedy sees pragmatism as the best response.
Assayas’s most dramatic twist on the double
plotline occurs in the introduction of a third
narrative preoccupation that, from the start,
collapses any distinction between work and
love, art and life. This is found in Non-Fiction’s
treatment of autofiction, a form of fictionalised
autobiography in which the line between true and
false can be near impossible to draw. Here, Assayas
has his finger on the pulse of contemporary
trends in literature: while autofiction has had an
established presence in France since the 1970s,
in recent years it has become an international
phenomenon, with the success of writers such
as Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgård, Ben Lerner
and Edouard Louis. It is a form in which the ‘I’
meets the word and the world, where experience
becomes story, perfect for the age of social
networks, in which personal authenticity is the
greatest commodity of all. If the film’s discourse on
e-publishing provides one set of answers as to what
happens to literature in the age of the internet,
the popularity of autofiction offers another.
Léonard’s new book rides this wave, relating
events of his private life – including his affair
with Selena. Some details have been changed:
her name is different, and a blowjob in a cinema
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