Dou­bles Vies – first look review

Olivi­er Assayas’ recent work has inter­ro­gat­ed dif­fer­ent forms of cre­ativ­i­ty, such as act­ing in Clouds of Sils Maria and fash­ion in Per­son­al Shop­per. In his lat­est film, Dou­bles Vies (Non-Fic­tion), he does the same thing for lit­er­a­ture. Alain (Guil­laume Canet), Sele­na (Juli­ette Binoche) and Leonard (Vin­cent Macaigne) are a trio of cre­atives search­ing for sat­is­fac­tion – both cre­ative and roman­tic – against the back­drop of a stag­nat­ing pub­lish­ing industry.

Assayas explores how the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion has changed pub­lish­ing, though he does feel quite a bit behind the times, like an old­er rel­a­tive excit­ed­ly telling you about this hot new craze called ​‘the inter­net’. Real­ly, this is a cul­tur­al debate that took place in the worlds of books, mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers some 10 years ago. The debates as pre­sent­ed here are thor­ough and inter­est­ing but offer noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly new. They’re also quite aca­d­e­m­ic, with many of the dry quips in Assayas’ script feel­ing more suit­ed to the page than screen. When done right this kind of high-brow cin­e­ma can be invig­o­rat­ing, but a film about a group of priv­i­leged intel­lec­tu­als sneer­ing about the kids on Twit­ter affirms the worst clichés of the French arthouse.

Aside from philosophis­ing on the pub­lish­ing indus­try, Dou­bles Vies rais­es some inter­est­ing ques­tions about the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nature of art. Assayas hints at what his stance might be by mak­ing Leonard and his ​‘auto-fic­tion’ the butt of many jokes, with his char­ac­ters’ real-life alter egos painful­ly trans­par­ent to every­one who knows him. This is the one aspect of the sto­ry that feels up to date, as the ques­tion of whether it’s right to make art from oth­er people’s lives feels more rel­e­vant than ever in the age of real­i­ty TV and social media.

Macaigne plays the com­ic to a tee, form­ing a great dou­ble act with his part­ner Valérie (French come­di­an Nora Hamza­wi). He hap­less­ly fish­es for com­pli­ments and she stonewalls him, pro­vid­ing a per­fect exam­ple of the frag­ile cre­ative ego and Leonard’s far­ci­cal attempts to keep it togeth­er. Binoche and Canet are both great indi­vid­u­al­ly as well, though their char­ac­ters are under­de­vel­oped and real­ly just mouth­pieces for argu­ments that even peo­ple in the pub­lish­ing indus­try got sick of years ago.

Assayas’ flu­id direc­tion brings ener­gy to these con­ver­sa­tions, but there’s only so much you can sex up the books ver­sus Kin­dle debate. The com­ic scenes are the most assured, cap­tur­ing some bril­liant reac­tion shots that real­ly sell the Sisyphean task of being a strug­gling author. Dou­bles Vies is pleas­ant enough, and will like­ly stim­u­late some thought for any­one with a stake in the future of how we buy and read books, but it’s not up there with the director’s best.