Wednesday 8 July 2020

Non-Fiction (2020) - Movie Review



After co-writing a film with Roman Polanski (what’s the French word for ‘oof’?), writer/director Olivier Assayas has returned to his French-language roots with a look at the modern-day publishing industry. Yes, this means that we’re still in ‘writer porn’ mode from the last review, although I’d argue that this makes for something far more substantive than Vita & Virginia. The reason why I specified ‘porn’ to describe it is that it functions in a similar fashion; art it may be, but substantial it is not. Where that film ultimately faffed around with flowery prose, making half-statements about the worth of such wording but never really getting to the heart of anything, this film goes beyond just the philosophy of writing: It’s also about the logistics of writing in the Internet age.

It basically does for literature what Clouds Of Sils Maria did for cinema, with Assayas’ and his highly-capable cast presenting a series of viewpoints on the larger subject, each with their own eccentricities and sticking points, where none of them are definitively presented as the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ opinion; just that they are opinions. And when discussing something as turbulent as what the print industry has had to adjust to in light of technological advances, there’s a lot to get into.

The process of writing, obscuring real-life inspirations in an era where Google can uncover most of that inspiration in real-time, getting work published, writing for books vs. writing for blogs, and the ever-popular notion that the place the critic once had in the larger conversation isn’t what it used to be; it covers a staggering amount of ground, all couched in relatable performances and appealing phrasing, and it manages to reach an equal amount of truth in regards to just how much has changed, and will continue to change, in this industry.

I’m not exactly breaking new ground by saying that I found my passion, writing about film, right around the time it started becoming phenomenally unreliable as an actual profession. The same thing that gave me a platform, the democratisation of voices on the Internet, is the same thing that stands between me and a potential audience; hard to pick out a single grain of sand on the world's longest beach. If I sound bitter about that, that genuinely isn’t the intention; just the latest instance of drawing from my own life to relate to a given feature.

Which itself is also a topic of conversation within the film itself, and it’s here where the title reaches its peak of poignancy. Along with questioning the exact line between fact and fiction in writing, given how the majority of writers draw from their own perspectives on reality to write in either category, the dialogue also ponders about how the perspective of the reader/audience affects that line.
For example, one of the bigger signs of bad writing in literature is a lack of description of where events are taking place. In those instances, a reader usually takes pieces from their own past to fill in the blanks (e.g. if the story takes place in a school, but one where the ‘visual’ details are sparse, readers might substitute their own in their minds). And even with arguably ‘good’ writing, this tendency remains. So who’s to say, once the work has been filtered through that process, that what results from it even qualifies as fact or fiction?

Of course, this observation itself is only part of the grander point of the film at large, and it’s about more than just the logistics of writing or the web of cheating spouses that make up the main characters; it’s change. In the text, it’s presented as changing from print media to digital media, going from hardcover books to e-books and even audiobooks. Or possibly changing from digital back to print, given some of the financial statistics given. Which direction isn’t especially relevant, because no matter what the change is, it’s still going to happen and you can either fight against it or work with it.

It’s an almost-Taoist perspective that I honestly wouldn’t have guessed would show up in a film like this, but it’s one that I find quite engaging and, my own Taoist leanings notwithstanding, poignant. It’s a thoughtful and well-executed look at Internet-era turbulence, how much it has changed the way we consume media and even interaction with other people (both for good and for bad), and how important it is to flow with how much the world continues to shift under our digital footprint.

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