Non-fiction  ★★½

FRENCH comedy/drama Non-Fiction is a frustrating watch.

It’s well shot and acted but the writing doesn’t have the same sparkle or edge as the best French films of its type.

Writer and director Olivier Assayas has had a good critical run in recent years with Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016) the stand-outs. Non-Fiction will be a drawcard for the legion of Juliet Binoche fans, but is less interesting overall.

Overall the film doesn’t work because you aren’t sufficiently invested in the characters or the situations they are dealing with, both professional and personal. It’s also not particularly funny.

At one stage I started to wonder whether Assayas is actually sending up his characters with some of the unengaging sequences, but ultimately there is no pay-off to prove this was the case.

Guillaume Canet, so good in the recent comedy Sink or Swim, plays Alain, a literary editor struggling with the twin dillemmas of how to navigate changes to his industry and manage a wife and a lover. Having used the term ‘struggling’ for both, he actually spends far more time worrying about his professional rather than personal issues.

The first 15 minutes of the film is a sign of the approach and problems to come. This time is spent with Alain locked in a meandering discussion with one of his clients Laurence, played by Vincent Macaigne.

Alain doesn’t like Laurence’s latest novel and won’t publish it, but he can’t bring himself to say this in direct terms. He verbally dances around the issue for reasons that prove to be not that revealing or pertinent to the film’s resolution.

While Alain and Laurence have known each other for many years it’s hard to tell throughout the film what form their friendship actually has. Again, a fault of the script rather than the actors.

Laurence is full of self-doubt over his talent and shares Alain’s concerns over their industry’s future, particularly the impact of digital mediums on the traditional delivery of the written word via books.

Both men are having relationships with women other than their partners and we also see the perspectives of Alain’s wife Selena, played well as always by veteran Juliet Binoche, and Laurence’s partner. But unfortunately, the emotional stakes are too measured.

Everyone seems more interested in discussing subjects that would seem to be more the stuff of documentaries, such as the inpact of e-books on reading patterns, and for what seems like some interminably long periods of time.

I mean who wakes up and immediately re-starts a debate abouts the future of books versus digital platforms?

It’s a heavy script that focuses far too much on mundanity, using hundreds of words in constant repetition of limited themes. If this is a passion subject for Assayas, he has used the wrong vehicle to present and dissect it.

More than an hour into the film we finally have a discussion about a personal issue that means something significant to the characters and audience. The film then takes off to a degree and becomes more engaging and flirts with comedy and romance to a relatively satisfying conclusion.

But despite the best efforts of the cast the film struggles for most of its running time to become more than a series of discussions without a great deal of heart nor of any significant consequence.

Non-fiction is showing as part of the 2019 Perth International Film Festival season at UWA Somerville Auditorium from February 18-24 and ECU Joondalup Pines from February 26-March 3.