Non-Fiction review – compulsive and playful literary satire

A satirical comedy of manners set in the world of publishing that occasionally feels like attending a lecture, Non-Fiction won’t be everyone’s idea of a good time at the movies. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, one of France’s most consistently fascinating auteurs, it’s a work with the air of a frustrated filmmaker getting things off his chest, disguising it, unsubtly, as a playful drama about middle-aged couples fighting cultural irrelevancy in a rapidly-changing world.

Alain (Guillaume Canet) is an editor with a preference for traditional publishing methods, though he’s facing a big problem as physical sales begin to plummet in favour of e-books. He’s not too keen on his client, Léonard’s (Vincent Macaigne), latest novel either, another work of obvious autofiction that may or may not have crossed a personal boundary. Meanwhile, Alain’s actor wife, Selena, (Juliette Binoche) isn’t sure whether to renew her contract on a popular but artistically unfulfilling cop show, whilst Léonard’s wife, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), is a political consultant in the midst of a social media crisis. Ah, and everyone here is either having an affair or suspects somebody else of having one, almost to the point of apathy – and parody.

Assayas touched on this territory before in his near-masterpiece Clouds of Silas Maria, which also starred Juliette Binoche. And whilst in that film she was an actress threatened by a younger star, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, here the characters are threatened by a fast-moving digital world they do not understand – or is it a world they understand but do not wish to? The impermanence of social media doesn’t gel with the legacy-based outlook they’ve imagined for themselves, and they can’t figure out whether to reject or embrace the change.

Non-Fiction might take place in the world of publishing, but it’s just as much about the shifting face of cinema and television, of the entire pop culture spectrum at large. It also shares some DNA with Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, with its similar plot of an author who mines his own life (and his friends’ lives) for material. As Assayas interweaves long, rambling conversations about e-books and Twitter (and the strangest reference to Star Wars: The Force Awakens you’re ever likely to encounter in an arthouse film) with scenes of adultery that make the act seem commonplace, Non-Fiction verges on French caricature. In using his characters as thinly-veiled mouthpieces, Assayas draws a line between autofiction and the idea that all these people – in one way or another – are leading double lives.

For some, the very notion of Non-Fiction – white, middle-class intellectuals drinking wine in spacious houses packed with books – is sure to send them running for the hills. But the film’s satirical edge makes it surprisingly easy to digest, and its playful tone – complete with meta gags – suggests Assayas is not only poking light fun at these types, but at himself. Non-Fiction doesn’t come over like the work of a dinosaur lamenting an older, better way of doing things, either: this writer-director isn’t rallying against a more technology-driven, disposable future as much as he seems to be coming to terms with it in his own idiosyncratic way. The ending, unexpectedly heartfelt, even hints that this filmmaker might believe there are more important things to life than the conversations driving his film anyway.

★★★★☆

By: Tom Barnard

Get Non-Fiction showtimes in London.