France

NON-FICTION: Olivier Assayas has wasted too many hours of my life

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Guillaume Canet (left) and Vincent Macaigne in NON-FICTION

I finally got around to watching writer-director Olivier Assayas’ Non-Fiction. I had been eager to see it because I generally find the French actor Vincent Macaigne hilarious, and I will pretty much watch Juliette Binoche in anything. My conclusion: Olivier Assayas has wasted too many hours of my life, and I am over his films.

Non-Fiction is a comedy of manners that revolves around the once-successful novelist Leonard, whose books are very lightly disguised re-tellings of his own sordid romantic life, and Leonard’s publisher Alain (Guillaume Canet). Alain is married to Selena (Juliette Binoche), an actress in TV cop shows. Everybody sleeps with somebody else’s partner, and everyone wrings their hands over e-books, audio books, blogs and the impending death of the book industry. That’s about it. None of it is engaging.

In 2006, Assayas, a veteran screenwriter, wrote and directed an okay segment (the one with Maggie Gyllenhaal as an actress pining for her drug dealer) in the delightful anthology Paris, je t’aime. He followed it in 2008 with the fine family drama Summer Hours. And then, in 2011, he did the excellent true crime mini-series Carlos. This was a promising start, and he developed a fan base of admiring critics.

But since then, Assayas has wasted brilliant performances by Binoche and Kristen Stewart in the Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper – two muddled messes that masquerade as cinema. And now, the off-putting Non-Fiction. I am over this guy.

SPOILER: There is one funny moment in Non-Fiction, which I shall now spoil for you, so you won’t need to watch the movie. In the last quarter of the film, the characters decide to publish an audio book read by a celebrity, and they aspire to get Juliette Binoche (who is, of course, in this scene playing her character). I’ll concede that this is a genuinely witty moment, if self-referential.

Non-Fiction is now streaming on Amazon and other platforms.

GODARD, MON AMOUR: squandering artistic genius with political dilletantism

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Louis Garrel in a scene from Michel Hazanavicious’s GODARD, MON AMOUR, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Godard, Mon Amour is a bitingly funny portrait of flawed genius. Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) pays tribute to the genius of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s early career while satirizing Godard’s personal excesses.

Godard, Mon Amour traces the three pivotal years after Godard married Anne Wiazemsky, the 19-year-old star of his La Chinoise. Godard (Louis Garrel) is age 37. In the preceding seven years he has helped revolutionize cinema as a leader of the French New Wave. He has made three masterpieces: Breathless, Contempt and Band of Outsiders. This is the Godard of “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”

But now Godard has become a doctrinaire Maoist and rejects his past work. He sees himself as a thought leader of revolutionary politics – but that is a delusion. He’s just a political amateur, a poseur, a tourist.

Stacy Martin (center) in a scene from Michel Hazanavicious’s GODARD, MON AMOUR, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

“Godard is dead”, Godard declaims. But young Anne (Stacy Martin) has hitched her star to the old Godard, the master of cinematic innovation and rock star, not this new dogmatic Godard.

This is also a snapshot of 1967, when many on the French Left believed that revolution in France was around the corner.  By 1969, it was apparent to virtually everyone that this had been a mirage, that revolution was not going to happen.  To everyone but Godard, who stubbornly stuck with his dogma.

Louis Garrel, his dreamboat looks glammed down with Godard’s bald spot, is often very funny as he deadpans his way through Godard’s pretensions.  In Godard, Mon Amour, Godard’s thinking has become so devoid of humor, nuance, texture and ambiguity that his art has become one-dimensional and boring.  Indeed, I have found all of the Godard films since 1967’s Weekend to range from disappointing to completely unwatchable.  Godard is alive at age 87 and still making movies today – and they all suck.

In his very biting send-up of Godard’s personal failings, Michel Hazanavicius pays tribute to Godard’s groundbreaking cinematic techniques.  We see jump cuts, breaking the fourth wall, shifting between color and negative imagery, subtitling the characters’ interior thoughts over their spoken dialogue and references to earlier movies.  It’s all very witty.

There’s even a motif of repeatedly broken spectacles as an homage to Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run.  In one of the more obvious jokes, Godard and Anne debate whether either would choose to appear nude in a movie while they walk around their room in complete, full-frontal nudity.

The more of Godard’s films you have seen, the more enjoyable you will find Godard, Mon Amour. If you don’t get the allusions to Godard’s filmmaking, you may find the protagonist of Godard, Mon Amour to be miserably tedious.  I saw Godard, Mon Amour at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It opens this Friday in the Bay Area.

PARIS CAN WAIT: female fantasy (disputed) and tantalizing food

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PARIS CAN WAIT
PARIS CAN WAIT

Here’s an entertaining piece of fluff.  In Paris Can Wait, Diane Lane plays Anne, the neglected wife of movie mogul Michael (Alec Baldwin).   A show biz emergency has short-circuited their European vacation in Cannes, and the Michael’s French partner Jacques (Arnaud Viard) offers to drive Anne to Paris.   It should be a seven-hour drive, but Jacques stretches it out to take in as many fine dining experiences as he can pack in.

The flirtatious but gentlemanly Jacques is an expert gourmand and a militant epicurean.  And he has resolved to make Anne feel special in ways that her husband doesn’t, at least anymore.  Anne enjoys the attention, but she is anything but naive.  She and the audience are expecting Jacques to make a pass at any moment.

As the closing credits rolled,  most of the women in my audience applauded.  Above all, Paris Can Wait is a fantasy from a woman’s point of view.  That woman is director Eleanor Coppola, who, at the age of 81, has made her first fiction film.  Coppola had previously made what is perhaps the best ever “making of” documentary, the 1991 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which chronicled the making of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now!.  Eleanor and Francis have been married since 1963, and their daughter Sofia just won Best Director at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for her remake of The Beguiled.

The great and underutilized Diane Lane is such a masterful and magnetic actor.  Anne is an unchallenging role, but it’s still hard to imagine anyone better.   In the 1980s,  Lane started her run of The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club and as Paulette Goddard in Chaplin.  Her most unforgettable role was probably as Lorie in the 1989 classic miniseries Lonesome Dove.  My own favorite Diane Lane performance was the one for which she was Oscar-nominated, in 2002’s Unfaithful.    I’ll watch her in anything.

Arnaud Viard, a French actor whose work, mainly on French TV, I wasn’t familiar with, is perfect as the debonair but vulnerable Jacques.  As we would expect, Alec Baldwin is excellent as the self-absorbed blowhard Michael.

Paris Can Wait is probably even more of a travelogue than a romantic comedy.  France is a beautiful country, and Jacques and Anne get to drive and picnic through the most scenic parts.  And then there’s the food – serious food porn!  This is by no means an excellent movie, but if you enjoy France, and if you enjoy eating anywhere, this is a harmlessly fun 90 minutes.

[NOTE: The Wife disputes a) that this is a widespread female fantasy and b) that is was the women clapping in the theater, and she finds my “female fantasy” characterization to be offensive.  On the first point, she says that the story here is NOT something that would appeal to all or most women.  I remain convinced that a story in which a woman is found desirable by a non-threatening man who lavishes attention on her does appeal to women, at least more than to men (who I believe prefer non-platonic screen relationships).  On the second point, it is true, as she points out, that I always have us sit in the very front of the theater, and, with our backs to the rest of the audience, I did not actually see who was applauding.]