Love, sex, publishing, deception, Juliette Binoche. Ah, Paree!
Smoother than cafe au lait, the lowkeyed French confection “Non-Fiction” has a few things to say about publishing in the digital age; the old bourgeois guard making way for an adept, hungry new generation unattached to nondigital media; and touchy literary and artistic egos, falling in and out of favor, and bed.
“Non-Fiction” wastes no time. At the start, sleek, vaguely patronizing publishing house editor Alain (Guillaume Canet) ushers disheveled novelist Leonard (Vincent Macaigne) into his office. They talk about this and that: a recent political novel full of barely disguised real-life characters, for example. “I thought no one reads books anymore,” Leonard says, waiting for Alain to broach the real reason for the meeting.
Leonard’s newest manuscript, “Full Stop,” draws upon the writer’s non-fictional romantic entanglements for inspiration. At lunch, Leonard finally asks Alain what he thought of his book, which is another way of asking if Alain will publish. His reply, casually dismissive (“I thought you understood”), seals the deft 10-minute power play we’ve just witnessed.
Critic-turned-writer-director Olivier Assayas then takes us to dinner, at the home of Alain and his actress wife, Selena (Juliette Binoche). The guests include a blogger more proud of his 5,000 hits a day than with his actual literary output. Alain’s publishing house has recently hired a digital transition head, Laure (Christa Theret), whom Selena blithely describes as a brainy “sexual predator” type. She senses, accurately, that Alain is having an affair with her. And there are intimations in the opening scenes of “Non-Fiction” that Selena, too, has a lover.
Each new discussion pulls a variation on the theme of technological ambivalence. For someone like Laure, the world of print and actual paper can’t disappear fast enough, and there’s a bit of plot introduced midway involving a telecom giant’s interest in buying the firm and hastening the probable demise of the firm as Alain knows it.
In barely disguised code, “Non-Fiction” operates as a wry analysis of Assayas’ chosen profession as filmmaker. “It’s the elderly who read,” Alain notes. The specialized audience he covets is the same sort of audience an Olivier Assayas movie covets on the precarious modern-day art-house circuit.
There’s a fifth major character: political operative Valerie, married to Leonard, played with forthright charm by Nora Hamzawi. She’s at once the most driven and idealistic of this group. Two casual and reliably effective lines of suspense inform “Non-Fiction”: How, if ever, will the characters learn of their partners’ infidelities? And what will happen then?
“Some things are better left unspoken,” Valerie says to husband Leonard when he tries to broach the subject of his affair. “Not in a couple,” he counters. To which she says: “Especially in a couple.”
Assayas shot his film on Super 16 mm film, and the visual results are warm, slightly grainy, defiantly nondigital. “We must choose the change” that looms ahead, Laure tells Alain, “not suffer it.” A lot of the dialogue comes out that way, in succinct, facile axioms.
It plays as a comedy in its structure, and a drama in the margins, on the sidelines. Minor, clever, wonderfully acted, “NonFiction” makes room for jokes about “Star Wars,” Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” and, at one point, Binoche herself. It’s funny that way.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.