fbpx
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Print Edition
    • Get Home Delivery
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
    • Advertise
    • Submit Your Event
    • Customer Support
    • Submit A News Tip
    • Send Letter to the Editor
    • Where’s My Paper?
  • Our Newsletters
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Free HV1 Trial
Hudson Valley One
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s UP
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Subscribe to the What’s UP newsletter
  • Opinion
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Log Out
No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s UP
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Subscribe to the What’s UP newsletter
  • Opinion
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Log Out
No Result
View All Result
Hudson Valley One
No Result
View All Result

Literary affairs go digital in French comedy Non-Fiction

by Frances Marion Platt
June 20, 2019
in Stage & Screen
0
Literary affairs go digital in French comedy Non-Fiction

Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet in Non-Fiction.

Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet in Non-Fiction.

We live in an age when the very concept of personal privacy is under assault on so many levels that people who use any sort of social media are forced to choose between heeding the warnings of Edward Snowden and isolating ourselves completely from prevailing modes of communication, on the one hand, and resigning ourselves to the assumption that we have nothing worth the trouble of hiding, on the other. However carefully we tweak our Facebook privacy settings, there’s very little middle ground left to us. How this paradigm shift plays out in romantic as well as professional relationships is the subtext of the newest film comedy from French screenwriter/director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, Summer Hours).

This movie was originally supposed to be called E-Book, but that got dropped as “a bit too technical and too cold,” according to the director. It ended up with the title Doubles Vies (Double Lives) for the Francophone market – tipping us off that, deep down, this movie is a classic French sex farce – and Non-Fiction for us Anglophones. The latter title is a reference to the inability of the character Léonard (Vincent Macaigne) to write a novel that isn’t a roman à clef based on the latest in his own endless parade of sexual entanglements, or to restrain himself from basing his current female lead character on his most recent ex-girlfriend. In his head, as long as the work turns out good, it doesn’t matter what inspires him – or what real-world social fallout these exes end up having to endure.

The trouble for Léonard is that the quality of his work is uneven, and its marketability even more so. Our story begins as his publisher Alain (Guillaume Canet) is taking him out to lunch and delicately trying to tell him that the venerably literary imprint he manages is declining, for the first time in decades, to make an offer for his latest manuscript. While a competent, perhaps even gifted author, Léonard has gotten into a rut, writing essentially the same confessional stuff over and over. And Alain is feeling the winds of change in the publishing industry blowing cold down his neck. He has recently hired Laure (Christa Théret), a young hotshot who’s up on all the trends in e-publishing, to oversee the “digital transition” of his company. Although Alain has a seemingly happy marriage to an actress named Serena (the ever-sublime Juliette Binoche), his intellectual sparring with Laure over the future of publishing seems to be a turn-on, because they’re already having an affair. Serena suspects, but also has some secrets of her own, along with some plans to reinvent her own career, stagnating in a successful-but-unstimulating TV cop show.

Non-Fiction starts off as an exceedingly talky movie, and stays that way for most of its length. Alain and Serena’s Bohemian, artsy, left-leaning social circle is consumed with highly contemporary debate about whether or not paper books are dead, whether blogging qualifies as real writing, where to draw the line between entertainment and art, whether the Internet is democratizing information or isolating people in silos of their own prejudices and so on. For his part, Léonard has never read a blog and has no clue what his readership is saying about him online, until the once-avid crowd at a bookstore event gives him some hostile pushback about his latest novel.

That chilly reception, paired with the unexpected turndown from his longtime publisher, begins to shake Léonard out of his self-satisfied torpor in tiny increments – especially once his live-in girlfriend Valérie, bracingly played by the comedienne Nora Hamzawi, refuses to set aside her preoccupation with her own career as an aide to a socialist political candidate to offer him much in the way of sympathy. Valérie suspects that Léonard’s pattern of serial infidelity has not abated, and wonders who inspired the heroine in his latest manuscript. But she becomes the spokesperson in this story for the attitude that maybe ignorance is more blissful than total frankness in a relationship, bringing the Internet privacy debate to a more personal level.

For all the focus of this clever screenplay on topical issues of our digital-driven society, it dawns on the viewer by the end of the second act that what we’re enjoying here is fundamentally a French sex farce in highbrow clothing. And there’s nothing at all wrong with that. French cinema, like French culture, has always been good at this sort of thing: the mind and the body lustily coexisting, in a way that reminds us with a jolt how fundamentally Puritanism has soaked into our American bones. Viewers who can transcend their default tendency to want to draw a clear line between the two should find Non-Fiction a tonic treat.

Join the family! Grab a free month of HV1 from the folks who have brought you substantive local news since 1972. We made it 50 years thanks to support from readers like you. Help us keep real journalism alive.
- Geddy Sveikauskas, Publisher

Frances Marion Platt

Frances Marion Platt has been a feature writer (and copyeditor) for Ulster Publishing since 1994, under both her own name and the nom de plume Zhemyna Jurate. Her reporting beats include Gardiner and Rosendale, the arts and a bit of local history. In 2011 she took up Syd M’s mantle as film reviewer for Alm@nac Weekly, and she hopes to return to doing more of that as HV1 recovers from the shock of COVID-19. A Queens native, Platt moved to New Paltz in 1971 to earn a BA in English and minor in Linguistics at SUNY. Her first writing/editing gig was with the Ulster County Artist magazine. In the 1980s she was assistant editor of The Independent Film and Video Monthly for five years, attended Heartwood Owner/Builder School, designed and built a timberframe house in Gardiner. Her son Evan Pallor was born in 1995. Alternating with her journalism career, she spent many years doing development work – mainly grantwriting – for a variety of not-for-profit organizations, including six years at Scenic Hudson. She currently lives in Kingston.

Related Posts

Legendary Woodstocker will lead rare performance this Saturday
Stage & Screen

Legendary Woodstocker will lead rare performance this Saturday

June 27, 2025
Eugene Tyler Band comes to Rough Draft this Friday
Stage & Screen

Dance showcase in Kingston this weekend

June 26, 2025
Follow the yellow brick road to the Center for Performing Arts of Rhinebeck
Stage & Screen

Follow the yellow brick road to the Center for Performing Arts of Rhinebeck

June 5, 2025
Storytelling over jazz in Kingston this Saturday
Stage & Screen

Storytelling over jazz in Kingston this Saturday

May 30, 2025
Short films and songwriters join forces in Rosendale on Thursday
Stage & Screen

Short films and songwriters join forces in Rosendale on Thursday

May 28, 2025
Civic-minded documentary screening and volunteer fair coming to Kingston
Stage & Screen

Civic-minded documentary screening and volunteer fair coming to Kingston

May 10, 2025
Next Post
Lorraine Salmon reads her new memoir at Golden Notebook

Lorraine Salmon reads her new memoir at Golden Notebook

Weather

Kingston, NY
72°
Cloudy
5:28 am8:34 pm EDT
Feels like: 72°F
Wind: 1mph E
Humidity: 93%
Pressure: 29.97"Hg
UV index: 0
ThuFriSat
82°F / 68°F
86°F / 68°F
86°F / 68°F
powered by Weather Atlas

Subscribe

Independent. Local. Substantive. Subscribe now.

  • Subscribe & Support
  • Print Edition
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
  • Our Newsletters
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Free HV1 Trial

© 2022 Ulster Publishing

No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Art
    • Books
    • Kids
    • Lifestyle & Wellness
    • Food & Drink
    • Music
    • Nature
    • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Contact Us
    • Customer Support
    • Advertise
    • Submit A News Tip
  • Print Edition
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
    • Where’s My Paper
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Log In
  • Free HV1 Trial
  • Subscribe to Our Newsletters
    • Hey Kingston
    • New Paltz Times
    • Woodstock Times
    • Week in Review

© 2022 Ulster Publishing