Doubles vies [Non-Fiction] (Olivier Assayas, 2018)

[FrauBlucher]

I tried to create a thread in "Films" for Non Fiction, Olivier Assasyas but couldn't. Is that a change? I put it here being that's probably getting a CC release

I just got back from seeing this. I really liked it. He takes a look at the publishing industry and it's future with technology at the forefront of it's change. I really enjoyed the philosophizing and debates among the characters on what the future for writing, reading and the physical medium, which is really a metaphor for all art and how it's changing because of how technology is changing the habits of people's interests. I won't go into particulars at this point as to avoid spoilers. I'll wait for more folks see this. I think it will create some good discussion on this board.

[therewillbeblus]

I really enjoyed the philosophizing and debates among the characters on what the future for writing, reading and the physical medium, which is really a metaphor for all art and how it's changing because of how technology is changing the habits of people's interests.

I saw this last fall at IFF Boston, and enjoyed it as well, for similar reasons. Assayas presents a lot of interesting rhetorical questions and differing opinions, giving each the same weight in an objective stance. I appreciated the relativist approach, and embedded within these conversations was an acknowledgment that technology is advancing so rapidly that by the time we get through debating one area it’s dead and onto the next medium. This theme gave a sense of exhaustion and futility persisting in the characters’ lack of control over the ever-changing world, powerless, emasculated, coping by assimilation or hanging onto values as a defense mechanism to combat reality. However, this is also Assayas’s funniest and most lighthearted film in years, balancing out these deep issues in ways that work for the majority of the film. Binoche is excellent as always, but it’s Vincent Macaigne who comes away as the best part- and I laughed almost every time he was on screen. Unfortunately the blend of moods didn’t always work and this felt uneven at times, as well as clunky due to various subplots or filler details

Spoiler

(especially all the romantic affairs which just felt tacked on and fatty for the sake of the comedic portions, ultimately taking away from the film)

but it was a difficult balance to strike and an overall successful execution.

[FrauBlucher]

I wholeheartedly agree. I should've been a sociologist because I love these kinds of discussions about effects on society. And I think Assasyas did a commendable job in showing all views and ideas without preaching and taking sides. It was very observational. Even the political angle was very well designed as to not get bogged down in bombast.

Spoiler

(especially all the romantic affairs which just felt tacked on and fatty for the sake of the comedic portions, ultimately taking away from the film)

I do agree with you to an extent about the affairs but I felt...

Spoiler

The affair between the Binoche and Macaigne characters was to advance that he has a sleazy persona that the book brings to light. But I do agree that they were executed in a clunky fashion...kinda of just inserted-no pun intended- for comedic purposes or the lesbian scene which kind of came out of nowhere

but it didn't ruin the film for me at all.

My favorite scene was...

Spoiler

Macaigne's character doing the q&a in the bookstore. He got beat up pretty well but it was a view into his M-O. I do wish the radio interview scene was extended

[therewillbeblus]

Good point- you’re right that the affairs definitely provided a backdrop to some characterizations, though I can’t see any significant implications for any character other than Macainge that couldn’t have used an alternate plot device as exposition. The bookstore and radio scenes were hysterical, as is every interaction with any character he encounters in the film. His scenes with Binoche were comedy gold, so I welcomed them with open arms, and had less a problem with these than all the screen time devoted to the various trysts at play with the less endearing solipsistic and/or narcissistic people in the film, whose self-absorption wasn’t played for laughs. At the very least, they did leave space for characters to show more sides of themselves beyond the simplified adjectives I’ve used to describe them, creating three-dimensional people inside the fluff. These scenes didn’t ruin the film for me, but I wonder if there was a way to flesh out some of these characters without this overused plot contrivance.

[spectre]

I thought this was a really good film with few faults – great dialogue, genuinely intellectually stimulating ideas and fine acting. It struck me while watching that this is essentially a low-key sci-fi film; send it back in a time machine to, say, the 1970s, and this would be a fanciful vision of how a future world might be, with electronic devices proliferating and the idea of the physical book (perhaps?) going the way of the dinosaurs. There's no didacticism here about any of this, thankfully – it's all just a wry, pretty matter-of-fact reflection of how we live nowadays.

[Brian C]

This film isn't without interest - I haven't seen a film by Assayas that wasn't worth watching - but the comparisons to Summer Hours are too obvious for me to ignore, and this film lacks that film's extraordinary elegance in how its narrative was structured around Assayas's philosophical concerns about the nature of cultural heritage. A lot of the same concerns can be found here, especially in the way that our cultural heritage is preserved from one generation to the next, but too much of the dialogue feels structured like a debate to me. Characters often seem to be speaking with the author's voice, and these characters never feel natural and lived-in to me.

Now and again the film hits on a provocative idea, but generally I felt that the concerns over the future of publishing felt pretty vaguely defined to me, given how much of the film is devoted to them. The line of inquiry into Leonard's "fictional" accounts of his affairs is considerably more fruitful; the line where an author's experience and imagination meet, and how that affects those in his life, certainly seems like a rich vein for exploration. But the film pulls its punches here, making Leonard into a faithless creep. Macaigne's portrayal of this character is certainly amusing (and the reference to Haneke is genuinely funny), but there's really no thematic payoff here because it's apparent that Leonard isn't fictionalizing things at all and just enjoys letting the world know who he's been sleeping with.

[Nasir007]

I liked it. Of course, Assayas always makes good films.

But this suffers from the problem that some Woody Allen films do - nobody talks like this in real life.

I found the earlier part of the film where they kept talking to each other about blogs and publishing etc to be so absolutely frustrating. It wasn't human beings having conversations but blogs or editorials. It was just so didactic, people just talking in non-stop aphorisms. It saps the humanity out of the conversation completely.

There is a way to do this but also humanize these ideas and couch them in the very specific concerns of what the characters are thinking and feeling. As Assayas himself did to such extraordinary effect in Summer Hours. Some of these things need not even be verbalized but can be visualized.

It just felt like Assyass wrote a short story with very little visual appeal and instead of bothering to publish it, he just filmed it verbatim without translating it to the cinema.

Again, a good movie, but this is more like an exercise in making a talking heads movie rather than anything personal or meaningful that the artist wanted to convey to the world.

[FrauBlucher]

I found the earlier part of the film where they kept talking to each other about blogs and publishing etc to be so absolutely frustrating. It wasn't human beings having conversations but blogs or editorials. It was just so didactic, people just talking in non-stop aphorisms. It saps the humanity out of the conversation completely.

I didn’t feel that way at all. To me it felt natural, especially having experienced conversations very similar.

[zedz]

I found the earlier part of the film where they kept talking to each other about blogs and publishing etc to be so absolutely frustrating. It wasn't human beings having conversations but blogs or editorials. It was just so didactic, people just talking in non-stop aphorisms. It saps the humanity out of the conversation completely.

I didn’t feel that way at all. To me it felt natural, especially having experienced conversations very similar.

I haven't seen the film yet, so I have no idea how artificial / stylized the dialogue is (and Assayas is clearly an admirer of Godard and Fassbinder, so why wouldn't he be interested in exploring that mode?), but - have the people complaining about this actually spent much time around French people?

[Nasir007]

I have lived in France and yes I have spent much time around French people and spoken to them about lot.

Even so, I found the dialog in this extraordinarily unconvincing.

Like I said, it simply did not seem couched in any human concerns at all. It was like animated books spouting quotes at each other.

When the film actually begins to invest in actual human beings as it moves along, does it start to resemble the human kind we know. With genuine human concerns and emotions. Still driven by their passionately held principles and all, but couched in real concerns, real thoughts, real feelings, real fears and ambitions.

But that's just how I took it. I liked it still. Can't wait for his next film.

[Brian C]

I don’t speak French, and it’s certainly possible that the English translation used for the subtitles didn’t capture the flow of the dialogue all that well. This is not really an issue I’ve had with French films in general or Assayas’s specifically in the past, so I’m not sure that the French are too alien for me to get.

I also don’t think there’s really much Fassbinder DNA in the film. Godard is inescapable to some degree, but it feels like Assayas through and through, just less inspired than usual.

[zedz]

I don’t speak French, and it’s certainly possible that the English translation used for the subtitles didn’t capture the flow of the dialogue all that well. This is not really an issue I’ve had with French films in general or Assayas’s specifically in the past, so I’m not sure that the French are too alien for me to get.

I wasn't really getting at it being an alien culture, just that a lot of educated French people I've known are way more likely to get deeply engaged in high-level abstract / literary / philosophical / political discussions (rather than arguments) with one another than anything I've encountered amongst English-speaking communities.