Truer than life itself: the films of Olivier Assayas

Something in the Air, starring Lola Créton

A MUBI retrospective has made three films by French auteur Olivier Assayas available to a British audience. Markedly different in style, they share a preoccupation with the porous boundaries between fiction and life, between making art and making a living.

Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) tells the story of Maria Enders (Juliet Binoche), a middle-aged actor roped into starring in a new production of the play that made her famous as an eighteen-year-old, ‘Maloja Snake’. Named after a weather phenomenon found in the Swiss alps, it tells the story of a young assistant who seduces her boss and ruins her career. Twenty years previously, Enders had played the role of Sigrid, the young assistant, and now she has been cast as Helena, the older woman, while a rising star of trashy Hollywood movies is cast in her former role. 

Enders and her own young assistant Valentina (Kristen Stewart), read through the script in preparation while wandering a sublime Swiss landscape. The actor’s fears about her own middle-age manifest as contempt for her character and she grows to hate the whole play for its overblown artifice. ‘It’s theatre,’ her assistant tells her, ‘it’s an interpretation of life than feels truer than life itself.’

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria

In one scene, they begin reading a scene inside a house and as it progresses, they leave their scripts behind and walk out into the yard to continue. Their spilling out of the building is also the spilling over of fiction into life, and as the film goes on, the play engulfs the screenplay. Occasionally, Valentina reads the stage directions aloud – ‘End of act two’ – and the effect is jarring; we had forgotten that their dialogue was read from a book. 

These themes receive a more direct treatment in Non-Fiction (2018). Set in contemporary Paris, the film follows Léonard Spiegel, a successful novelist known for his auto-fiction, whose new manuscript is rejected by long-time friend and editor Alain. Alain is married to Selena (also played by Binoche), an actor who has been having an affair with Léonard, providing the material for his manuscript; now we understand why Alain has turned it down. 

Binoche and Guillaume Canet in Non-Fiction (Doubles vies)

The film displays an odd disjuncture between plot and its supposed subject: the characters endlessly discuss the state of publishing: blogs, e-books, Kindles, best-sellers and worst-sellers; yet their discussions never impact the story, which proceeds along a familiar plotline of adulterous middle-class love.

The four have dinner together and discuss a friend’s blog; Alain and his secret lover dress after sex and debate e-books. One wonders if the disjuncture is a joke – but at the expense of what? The cosy world of Parisian publishing that might be on its last legs?  Or fiction itself?

Clément Métayer and Lola Créton in Something in the Air

A more satisfying exploration of the porous border between fiction and real life can be found in Something in the Air (2012). Set in 1971, amidst the fallout of the May 1968 student protests in France (the French title is Après Mai), the film follows 17-year-old Gilles, an aspiring painter and filmmaker, and, we assume, Assayas’ alter-ego avatar in the film. We meet him at school, where he carves an anarchist symbol into his desk and sells a revolutionary newspaper outside of the gates. The revolutionary days may have passed but their spirit still hangs in the air, and Marxist conviction is as omniscient as cigarette smoke.

After a break-in at their school goes wrong and a security guard is hurt, Gilles and his friends head south for the summer with a radical filmmaking collective who are documenting the workers’ struggles in Italy. He falls for Christine, a young woman who, unlike Gilles, puts the struggle before art. 

The film-making collective is a serious bunch. Gilles’ request to borrow their cameras for one of his own projects is rejected: ‘we do agitprop,’ one of them tells him, ‘we don’t lend for fiction.’ Later, another member is overheard explaining their philosophy after a screening: ‘You can’t make entertainment films in revolutionary times.’  

Gilles is less sure. Despite Christine’s request that he stays with her and the collective, he decides to return to Paris; he has an entrance exam at the École des Beaux-Arts, and besides, he admits, ‘I don’t like them much. Boring films, primitive politics.’

‘The act on their convictions,’ Christina responds. ‘Do you do any better?’

This question hangs over the whole film. Are Gilles’ aspirations to become an artist, as his revolutionary comrades would have it, the individualistic aspirations of a bourgeois? Even if they are, will that stop him?

The pleasure, though, is not so much in watching that question play out as in enjoying the film’s slow meandering through a nostalgic and richly drawn world; these are the days of Assayas’ youth, and one sense’s his care and attention in every cigarette, unbuttoned shirt, and colourful revolutionary poster. 

All three films poke gentle fun at the more outlandish cinematic genres: in Clouds of Sils Maria, Enders and her assistant watch her young co-star’s newest release, a Marvel-style action film about mutants. In Non-Fiction, we see Binoche’s character at work in an action-packed police procedural TV show that contrasts humorously with her lover’s plotless auto-fiction. And in Something in the Air, Gilles departs from his radical friends and takes a job at Pinewood Studios, swapping a documentary about striking Italian workers for a film about British soldiers discovering an island of mermaids.

In these moments, one sees a manifesto for Assayas’ own work in reverse: fiction does not need mutants, armed police, or mermaids, because the raw stuff of everyday life is enough: an actor confronting her mortality as she prepares to take on a new role; writers and publishers making art, love, and money; a young revolutionary torn between art and politics. 

Assayas’ plots are never more implausible than life itself, and they do not need to be, because he shows us that people’s desires for fictions – for consuming them, making them, and living them – is itself fascinating.