Jason Adams reporting on the New York Film Festival which kicks off Friday night.
Calling a movie "Woody-Allen-ish" in 2018 is less of a double-edged sword than it is a single-edged one - there's not a lot of benefit; mostly just wounds. And yet Olivier Assayas' Non-Fiction kind of demands the comparison to Classic Woody - it's about a group of chatty literate urbanites having literate urbane chats in luxurious apartments and outfits, all of them sleeping with each other while being obsessed with death and sex and books, order TBD. It's terribly witty in that very specific way that certain New Yorkers love, where they can turn to the person next to them and smile and nod, everybody content that hey, they got that one.
And listen, hey, I am one of those Certain New Yorkers myself, so I'm allowed to make fun...
And anyway Non-Fiction makes the case that it's an International Phenomenon - white people are everywhere and all of those indoor scarves aren't going to wear themselves. New Yorkers don't have a monopoly on Seinfeldian shenanigans - everybody gets to make their jokes about sexual activities during Holocaust films, dammit.
Non-Fiction, then, is a very good classic Woody Allen movie - top tier. Besides just the jokes, of which there are good ones made all the better with legends like Juliette Binoche delivering them, Assayas really taps into the pathos, the Love & Death of it all, that marked Woody's best achievements - when you start looking for it the actual end of the world haunts every corner of this movie. At times it feels (and probably rightly so) like we're all chuckling politely on the deck of the Titanic. It's a mad mad mad mad world, folks.
The film centers around a book called Full Stop; the lack of ice in one character's beverage causes a miniature existential crisis. The word "dematerialization" pops up so often it should get second billing. Conversations circle around dying industries and our bottomless political cynicism swallowing up all hope - everybody bursts into tears at some point. And yet Assayas maintains an even temperature - like the myth of the boiling frog we don't even realize we're good and cooked until it's too late and we've laughed ourselves into utter oblivion.
Non-Fiction plays at NYFF on October 2nd and 3rd.