Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2002)

Connie Nielsen in Demonlover

Cast: Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Dominique Reymond, Jean-Baptiste Malartre, Gina Gershon, Edwin Gerard, Thomas M. Pollard, Abi Sakamoto, Naoko Yamazake, Nao Omori. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Denis Lenoir. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Luc Barnier. Music: Jim O'Rourke, Sonic Youth. 

Demonlover is a kind of message movie, and we all know the Hollywood truism about those: "If you want to send a message, call Western Union." But Olivier Assayas is not a Hollywood director, and his message comes through loud and clear. It's a familiar one: In the hands of globalized corporate capitalism, the internet has the potential to become a corrupting and alienating force. The film opens with a bunch of corporate capitalists luxuriating in business class on a flight to Japan to negotiate the rights to pornographic anime produced by a studio there. On the flight, Diane (Connie Nielsen) slips a drug into the Evian water being drunk by her superior at the Volf Corporation, Karen (Dominique Reymond), who collapses when they land in Tokyo. Diane then takes her place in the negotiations. It soon becomes clear that Diane will stop at nothing to seal a deal, but also that she's a double agent working for Volf's competitor, Mangatronics. Once Diane and her partner, Hervé (Charles Berling), land the rights, they begin negotiations with Demonlover, an internet company represented by Elaine Si Gibril (Gina Gershon), which also runs a site called The Hellfire Club on the dark web that specializes in torture porn and perhaps even snuff films. Diane's aim is to acquire Demonlover for Mangatronics instead of Volf, and she'll stop at nothing to do so. Unfortunately for Diane, her assistant, Elise (Chloë Sevigny), is also a corporate spy, and the spy vs. spy plot takes a bloody turn. Assayas isn't content to tell this story in conventional thriller fashion, so what we get involves a lot of disorienting camerawork and editing, and the movie makes its point with a somewhat disjointed ending. It was a critical and commercial flop, but the awareness that its message was prophetic has caused it to be reevaluated. 

Late August, Early September (Olivier Assayas, 1998)

 

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Virginie Ledoyen, François Cluzet, Jeanne Balibar, Alex Descas, Arsinée Khanjian, Mia Hansen-Løve, Nathalie Richard, Eric Elmosnino. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Denis Lenoir. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Luc Barnier. 

Late August, Early September is what you might call a “mood title” as opposed to a “content title.” It’s like the ones Yasujiro Ozu gave his films, such as Late Spring (1949) or Early Summer (1951), not so much about the time of the year as about the feelings those seasons or months evoke. Assayas’s film is about men and women who have reached that point in middle age at which it seems there’s no turning back, no starting a new path in life, but instead they must go on into their later years on the track where they’ve found themselves. The central character of the film is Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric), a writer/editor who at the start of the film is selling the apartment where he has lived with his girlfriend, Jenny (Jeanne Balibar). They have broken up fairly amicably and Gabriel has now started a relationship with another woman, Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), who is a little more impulsive and unsettled than Jenny. Gabriel is friends with Adrien (François Cluzet), a modestly successful novelist who is fretting about how modest that success has been. Adrien, too, has an ex, Lucie (Arsinée Khanjian), but he has now taken up with a 15-year-old girl, Véra (Mia Hansen-Løve), a relationship he has kept secret from his friends. Adrien is also suffering from an unnamed disease. The film explores the relationships among these characters, who talk and smoke and make love the way people in French films do – to the point where those of us who aren’t French may get a little impatient for the film to get on with a plot. But it’s so nicely acted by some very attractive performers that it didn’t wear me down, even though when it ended I wondered a little what point it was striving to make. 

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008)

Jérémie Renier, Juliette Binoche, and Charles Berling in Summer Hours

Cast: Charles Berling, Juliette Bioche, Jérémie Renier, Edith Scob, Dominique Reymond, Valérie Bonneton, Isabelle Sadoyan, Kyle Eastwood, Alice de Lencquesaing, Emile Berling, Jean-Baptiste Malartre. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Eric Gautier. Art direction: Fanny Stauff.  Film editing: Luc Barnier.

Summer Hours sounds like the title of a film by Yasujiro Ozu, but the resemblance doesn't stop there. It has the melancholy tinged with humor of that master's films, and like his Tokyo Story (1953), it begins with a family gathering and the subsequent death of the matriarch. But it takes place in another country half a century later, and milieu is almost everything. Now we are in France, and the characters it centers on, the siblings Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), are caught up in the global economy, with all that implies about letting go of the past, of pulling up roots. The Marly siblings, their spouses and children, and their mother, Hélène Berthier (who took her maiden name back after the death of her husband), are apparently content with their lives, but happy families are really not all alike. Olivier Assayas's story centers on a legacy, the stuff of 19th-century novels and murder mysteries as recent as Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019). But Assayas never lets his film sink into melodrama or the flamboyant acting out of squabbling heirs. It's about mature people facing the inevitable. Hélène (Edith Scob) has inherited the house owned by her uncle, a famous artist, which is filled with valuable works of art, though it is rather run down and very much lived in. The decorative panels by Redon are marred by damp, a broken plaster statuette by Degas is shoved into a cabinet -- itself a work of art -- in a plastic shopping bag, the art nouveau desk is cluttered with papers, and a couple of Corots hang casually in a hallway. When the family gathers there to celebrate Hélène's 75th birthday, she pulls the oldest, Frédéric, aside to give him some instructions about what to do with things when she's gone. This invariably awkward discussion is handled by Assayas and the actors with truth and finesse. Soon, sure enough, Hélène is dead, and the rest of the film is about the family coming to terms with the consequences of a legacy all of them treasure but none of them really has room for in their lives. It might be classified as a character study rather than a drama, but Assayas and company build such intimacy with the characters that we can feel the drama as intensely as if it dealt with matters of great moment and urgency.

Rendez-vous (André Téchiné, 1985)

Lambert Wilson and Juliette Binoche in Rendez-vous

Cast: Lambert Wilson, Juliette Binoche, Wadeck Stanczak, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Lavanant, Jean-Louis Vitrac, Jacques Nolot, Anne Wiazemsky, Olimpia Carlisi, Caroline Faro. Screenplay: André Téchiné, Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Renato Berta. Production design: Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko. Film editing: Martine Giordano. Music: Philippe Sarde.

The volatile, nigh unpredictable behavior of the characters in Rendez-vous keeps the viewer off balance, which is not unexpected from its screenwriters, two major French writer-directors, André Téchiné and Olivier Assayas, who delight in making their characters walk on a moral tightrope. At one point, the story looks like a familiar pattern, a love triangle involving Nina, an aspiring actress (Juliette Binoche); Paulot, a naively infatuated young man (Wadeck Stanczak); and Quentin, a swaggerer who at some moments brandishes a razor (Lambert Wilson). But things keep taking odd turns: Quentin dies in what could be an accident but is possibly a suicide, and then returns as a ghost, or at least a figment of Nina's imagination. Enter, too, Scrutzler, a theater director (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who wants to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet, and casts Nina, who really isn't very good, against the objections of the producers, only to reveal that he had in mind Quentin for Romeo -- for rather perverse reasons. Meanwhile, Paulot, who works as a real estate agent, pursues Nina, only to reject her after finally succeeding in having sex with her -- a bliss in proof and proved, a very woe. It's all very well-acted -- this was Binoche's first major film role -- but there's something unfocused about the story, as if the writers were making it up as they went along instead of having a clear goal in mind.

Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas, 2018)

Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet in Non-Fiction

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne, Christa Théret, Nora Hamzawi, Pascal Greggory, Laurent Poitrenaux, Sigrid Bouaziz, Lionel Drey, Nicolas Bouchaud. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Simon Jacquet.

If we learn anything about the French from watching their movies, it's that they love to talk. So many French films are made up of scenes at a table, in a bed, on a train, where the people are less interested in food or sex or travel than in batting ideas back and forth. In Non-Fiction the ideas are about literature and its relationship to life, to commerce, to truth. And yes, the phrase "post-truth era" makes its sullen appearance in the discourse. We begin with the meeting of the poised, groomed publisher Alain Danielson (Guillaume Canet) with the shaggy, bearded writer Léonard Spiegel (Vincent Macaigne), and we can tell from Leónard's slightly anxious manner and Alain's smooth control that things will not end the way Léonard wants: Alain, who has published his other books, is not going to publish his latest. Underlying the situation is something Alain may or may not know (Léonard isn't sure): that Léonard has been having an affair with Alain's wife, Selena (Juliette Binoche), and moreover that the affair is the subject of Léonard's novel. (Léonard has always written romans à clef, although this time he thinks he has thrown Alain off the track by having slept with a popular TV anchorwoman as well as with Selena.) Of course, Alain has been having his own affair with a young woman, Laure (Christa Théret), who works for the publishing company as a sort of "new media" adviser -- leading the talk into conversations about the death of print, the power of the Internet, and so on. Léonard has a wife, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), who is a consultant to a leftist politician and is so busy that she barely has time for Léonard -- at one point, when she is leaving for an appointment, he goes in for a goodbye kiss and gets the door shut in his face. As for Selena, she's an actress trying to decide whether to commit to another season of the TV cop show she's currently appearing in, or to take an offer to appear in a stage production of Racine's Phèdre, a role she fears may be a sign that she's getting old. There's also a sly "meta" moment in the film when someone suggests that the publisher should hire Juliette Binoche to read the audiobook version of Léonard's novel and asks Selena if she knows her. Some may question whether the film is a satire that doesn't quite have the courage of its bite, or a commentary on the decline of the arts in an era of self-absorption. All of the relationships in the film eventually resolve themselves a little anti-climactically, but Olivier Assayas has such a light touch with the film that it's best to just relax and listen to the talk.

Cold Water (Olivier Assayas, 1994)

Cyprien Fouquet and Virginie Ledoyen in Cold Water

Cast: Virginie Ledoyen, Cyprien Fouquet, László Szabó, Jean-Pierre Darrousin, Dominique Faysse, Smaïl Mekki, Jackie Berroyer, Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Denis Lenoir. Production design: Gilbert Gagneux. Film editing: Luc Barnier.

Olivier Assayas's semi-autobiographical film is set in the 1970s and follows two teenagers, Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine (Virginie Ledoyen), as they split from their messed-up families and set out to join a commune. They filch things from stores, experiment with drugs, and attend a wild party with other teenagers in an abandoned house that they eventually set fire to. It's a flashback to the rebellious youth movies of the 1960s and '70s, but given freshness by the performances and by the contemporary awareness of how sourly the freewheeling era of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll ended.

Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016)

Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper

Maureen: Kristen Stewart
Ingo: Lars Eidinger
Lara: Sigrid Bouaziz
Erwin: Anders Danielsen Lie
Gary: Ty Olwin
Detective: Hammou Graïa
Kyra: Nora von Waldstätten
Victor Hugo: Benjamin Biolay

Director: Olivier Assayas
Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe
Film editing: Marion Monnier

Olivier Assayas delights in showcasing Kristen Stewart's ambisexual persona in Personal Shopper, a tantalizing ghost story that carefully avoids predictability at every turn. At the end we're left to decide whether the ghosts Maureen encounters are real or just -- as the ghost itself seems to tell her with its single rap signifying "yes" in answer to her question -- projections of her own imagination. It's an ambiguity that seems to have frustrated audiences, which took less warmly to the film than the critics did: Critics see so many movies that resolve their enigmas too patly, so that any film which leaves a viewer dangling in uncertainty seems fresh. Stewart is onscreen for almost the entire film, so that it's easy enough to explain away her encounters with the supernatural as projections of her grief-sodden mind. But then Assayas presents inexplicable occurrences that Maureen doesn't or can't witness, such as the scene in which a hotel's elevator and automatic doors open at the command of an invisible figure, or the one in which we glimpse in the background, as the camera focuses on Maureen, a glass moving through the air and dropping to the ground to shatter behind her back. Assayas is deftly playing with our expectations that what the camera shows us must be real.

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)

Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria

Maria Enders: Juliette Binoche
Valentine: Kristen Stewart
Jo-Ann Ellis: Chloë Grace Moretz
Klaus Diesterweg: Lars Eidinger
Christopher Giles: Johnny Flynn
Rosa Melchior: Angela Winkler
Henryk Wald: Hanns Zischler

Director: Olivier Assayas
Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe
Film editing: Marion Monnier

Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria demands almost as much attention after you've finished it as it did while you were watching/reading it. The set-up is this: An actress, Maria Enders, is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous when she was only 18. Now that she's in her 40s, however, she will play the older woman who has a relationship with the character she earlier played. She accepts reluctantly, and then wants to back out when she finds that the younger actress, Jo-Ann Ellis, who has been cast in her original role is a Hollywood star best known not only for working in sci-fi blockbusters but also for her off-screen affairs that draw the attention of the paparazzi and Internet gossip sites. However, Maria's personal assistant, Valentine, thinks Jo-Ann is a good actress who has been exploited by the media, and persuades Maria to take the role. Maria and Valentine retreat to the home of the play's author, who has recently died, in Sils Maria, a Swiss village, where Valentine helps Maria learn her lines. As the film progresses, the lines of the play echo not only Maria's own feelings about growing older, but also the somewhat ambiguous relationship between Maria and Valentine. Indeed, it's often not entirely clear whether actress and assistant are reciting the lines of the play or are voicing their own feelings for each other. And then the casting of the film brings out another layer of meaning: Stewart is best-known for the Twilight movies, precisely the kind of Hollywood film that Maria turns up her nose at when she first hears about Jo-Ann's career. Assayas, who also wrote the screenplay, deftly juggles all these layers of art and reality, but the film would be nothing without Stewart's superb performance, which won her the César Award in France as well as the best supporting actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. There are those who think the film is more talk than substance and that it feels like a "high-concept" product: Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) meets All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), perhaps. But seeing Stewart interact with Binoche more than justifies it for me.