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.

Queen Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994)

Daniel Auteuil and Isabelle Adjani in Queen Margot

I thought I knew enough about 16th-century French history, if only from reading Robert Merle's Fortunes of France books, to follow Patrice Chéreau's Queen Margot fairly easily. But the film's rather hyperactive opening almost kept me in the dark: literally, because it begins with a Protestant man accidentally getting in bed with a Catholic man, and an ensuing fight. Then we shift to the wedding of the Catholic Marguerite de Valois (Isabelle Adjani) to the Protestant Henri de Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), and an ensuing riotous wedding night, during which Marguerite refuses to go to bed with her new husband but, feeling randy, goes out into the streets to pick up a man. The man, with whom she has very passionate sex against a wall, turns out to be the Protestant we saw earlier, La Môle (Vincent Pérez). And when Marguerite rescues him during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, they begin an affair. But wait, there's more. There's court intrigue involving the somewhat insane Charles IX (Jean-Hugues Anglade); his mother, Catherine de' Medici (Virna Lisi); and his brother, the Duke of Anjou (Pascal Greggory). There's internal and international squabbling between Protestants and Catholics. There are poisonings and boar hunts, and a lot of other stuff. Eventually, I sorted it all out, but it left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. It's beautifully filmed by Philippe Rousselot, and the costumes by Moidele Bickel were nominated for an Oscar. The screenplay by Chéreau and Danièle Thompson is adapted from a novel by Alexandre Dumas, and neither screenplay nor novel should be relied on for historical accuracy. Adjani seems to struggle a bit with the vagaries of her character, whose sympathies shift from Catholic to Protestant and from man to man all too easily. The standout performance is that of Lisi, who was an international sex symbol in the 1950s and '60s, and makes the scheming Catherine a figure of some complexity.