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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