Tag Archives: Olivier Assayas

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Scenes from Another Marriage

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Bergman Island

by Hope Madden

A lot can go wrong when a filmmaker toys with meta-filmmaking. The movie can become cloyingly clever, it can lose the audience in its self-indulgence, it can become more of a trick than a film.

While Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is arguably as self-indulgent a film as you will find, she risks all these trappings but falls to none.

Her movie follows two filmmakers, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), who leave their daughter with Chris’s mom so they can devote themselves to some solid writing time. They travel to Fårö island, where Ingmar Bergman lived, worked and shot some of his most famous films.

Bergman Island feels extremely personal in the way that it mirrors, to what degree it’s hard to know, Hansen-Løve’s real-life relationship with filmmaker Olivier Assayas and their devotion to the work of Bergman. There’s also a very intimate sense of the way one filmmaker’s inspiration from the same source can look so very different from another’s. And, of course, there is a kind of dreamy link between generations of filmmakers.

Most importantly, though, this is the story of a couple. Casting is one of Hansen-Løve’s greatest strengths here because, without the committed and vulnerable performances she draws from Krieps and Roth, the film could easily have folded in on itself. It does not, not for a moment.

Roth’s distance as a partner speaks not only to Tony’s ego and insecurity but to his support and understanding – Tony recognizes that this process will be prickly and leaves as much room as he thinks his partner may need to create.

This subtlety becomes a sly maneuver, as you begin to understand the story Chris works on.

The entire tale unfolds on the breathtaking island, where Chris’s stories — her real-life story with Tony, as well as the story within a story she writes — benefit from the windswept beauty of the island.

Bergman Island tells you a lot but leaves it to you to decide what it’s saying. Whatever tale you decipher, your time on the island is well spent.

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Stranger than Fiction

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Non-Fiction

by Hope Madden

Nothing ever changes. That appears to be the sentiment behind Olivier Assayas’s chamber dramedy Non-Fiction, a tale set in the middle of the dying publishing industry, a relic that either needs to embrace digital disruption or die trying.

Or does it?

Hard to say, although a lot is being said. This is perhaps Assayas’s talkiest and most Parisian film to date. And yet, it’s breezy and honest. It’s also cagey and cynical.

What Non-Fiction is depends on your mood, perhaps, because every scene unfolds in about thirty ways. Jubilant performances buoy whip-smart writing that skewers the very platitudes it seems to be promoting.

Novelist and lazy anarchist Leonard (Vincent Macaigne) prefers to ever-so-slightly tweak his own daily life and liaisons than create characters and plots. Unfortunately, the audience at large – and his friend and editor Alain (Guillaume Canet – incredible) in particular – have grown weary. Is it even fiction? And do the women so thinly veiled in the works have any right to their own stories?

Does it even matter? Audio books and eReaders are the hot tickets now, or so says Laure (Christa Théret), sent to the publisher to drum up excitement for a digital transformation.

Well, Alain’s wife Selena (Juliette Binoche, also spectacular) prefers real, concrete books. She’s an actress coming to terms with bingeable cop shows rather than stage work, except when she’s not.

Valerie (Nora Hamzawi) turns out to be the only straightforward and entirely decent character in the film. The fact that she is A) the only one entirely outside of entertainment and publishing, and B) indeed in politics, allows Assays to say quite a lot about his feelings for the industry.

And as everyone talks and talks and desperately talks about changing paradigms in taste, consumption and art, they are eating, drinking and having sex. Because truly, some things do not change—especially in French films.

Assayas keeps his incredibly verbose scenes aloft with a wandering camera that feels like another guest at the party. Bright, funny, biting performances highlight actors who relish the challenge of bringing the script to life. Binoche is at her slippery best.

Non-Fiction toes the line of being too smart for its own good, of losing its audience for its serpentine commentary. But it never does. Assayas and his savvy foursome are having too much fun themselves for their effort to do anything other than entertain.

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Shop ’til you Drop

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Personal Shopper

by Hope Madden

Kristin Stewart is an acquired taste. In the last few years, though, she’s shown in a handful of indies that she has some talent. Not a great deal of range, but some definite talent.

That shone most brightly in writer/director Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film Clouds of Sils Maria.

In that film, Stewart played the put-upon personal assistant to a demanding celebrity. Assayas places Stewart in a similar position but with wildly differing themes for his latest, Personal Shopper.

Stewart plays Maureen, an introverted American in Paris. By day, Maureen darts around Paris and even trains to London to pick up fancy-schmancies for her A-lister boss to wear to this red carpet or that fashion show.

By night, though, Maureen wanders the empty rooms of her deceased twin brother Lewis’s old house. Both siblings possessed the gifts of a medium, and Maureen wants to contact Lewis.

It’s a ghost story of sorts, with a bit of a mystery thrown in for good measure, but what Personal Shopper really offers is an exploration of isolation, alienation and identity in the digital age.

Maureen is almost always almost alone. As the film opens, her friend drops her off at Lewis’s old house and Maureen asks, “You’re not staying?”

No, she is not. It’s just Maureen in this old house and her desire to connect with someone.

Likewise, Maureen periodically Skypes with her boyfriend, on some kind of IT assignment halfway across the globe. And she is always just missing the celebrity she shops for. Maureen’s solitary existence is a series of near-connections.

Assayas explores this most fully with an anxiety-inducing texting relationship with an unknown contact – a plot device that attempts to drive the themes and storyline forward. But, as is often the case with this filmmaker, ambiguities and curiosities are more important than closure or action.

Aside from an unfortunate run-in with CGI, the film barely registers as horror and impatient genre fans are likely to be disappointed. But for a lonesome comment on modern times – or for proof that Kristin Stewart can actually act – it’s not bad.

Verdict-3-0-Stars





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A Maria Full of Grace

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Clouds of Sils Maria

by George Wolf

Somewhere between Twilight and the tabloids, Kristen Stewart began doing some real acting. She’s better than ever in Clouds of Sils Maria, and though hers is a supporting role alongside one of the screen’s major talents, Stewart pulls plenty of weight in a terrific drama with much to say.

Juliette Binoche is customarily excellent as Maria, a famous actress returning to the stage in a revival of the play that launched her career twenty years earlier. This time, though, she’s playing the older female lead, while a Lindsay Lohan clone named Jo-Ann (Chloe Grace Moretz, striking just the right tone of clueless entitlement) is taking the role Maria originated.

Stewart is Maria’s ever-present personal assistant Valentine, who not only runs both errands and lines for Maria, but serves as her bridge to a younger generation.

Writer/director Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours) takes the intimate psychological playground of Polanski’s Venus in Fur, and laces it with the pop culture commentary of Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars. Binoche and Stewart swim gracefully inside the play within a play setup, slowly moving Maria and Valentine in directions that mirror the script both characters are reading.

The actresses display an easy chemistry, never more apparent than when Valentine is trying to sell Maria on the merits of young Hollywood. In the film’s most deliciously meta moment, Stewart might just as well be telling all of us Twilight haters to get over it already.

Assayas’s script is sharp and his camera is fluid, effectively blurring the line between onstage and off. Revisiting the play forces Maria to confront her past and question her present, and Binoche reveals the various layers with a gentle, masterful touch.

The beauty of Clouds of Sils Maria lies in its subtle complexity. It offers sly insights that sneak up on you, and an exceptional cast to make them stick.

 

Verdict-4-0-Stars