The American Film Institute’s annual film festival is arguably Los Angeles’ best and most comprehensive annual fête of feature, documentary, short, animated, domestic and foreign cinema. Here are reviews of two of AFI Fest 2018’s myriad productions.
The son of film/TV director Jacques Remy (best known for directing the Inspector Maigret series), Olivier Assayas continues the aesthetic of the French New Wave’s auteurs. His sensibilities seem to range from Francois Truffaut’s (when it comes to romance) to Jean-Luc Godard’s in terms of politics (if not film form). His previous movies include the 2002 thriller Demonlover and works dealing with leftwing subjects – 2010’s Golden Globe winner Carlos, about terrorist “Carlos the Jackal,” which scored Edgar Ramirez Emmy and Golden Globe acting noms, plus 2012’s superb Something in the Air, about French radicals shortly after the May 1968 student-worker uprising.
Assayas’ new feature, Non-Fiction (its title in French is Double Vies, which means “Double Lives”), takes an insightful look at the changes sweeping book publishing as high tech digital modes upend the print cosmos, just as Gutenberg’s printing press affected the creation and consumption of handmade illuminated manuscripts about 600 years ago. This is a complex topic made all the more complicated by having, ironically, non-French speakers read the English subtitles, as the Gallic characters wax philosophical about print versus pixels, reading on paper as opposed to on screens in the form of e-books, Kindle and so on as new technology challenges the traditional.
The writer/director succeeds in doing so by dramatizing the dilemma with characters embodying aspects of this brave new world. Non-Fiction’s best known thesp is Juliette Binoche, who co-starred in Assayas’ mediocre, Swiss-set 2014 Clouds of Sils Maria, also as an actress. Here she portrays Selena, who stars in a weekly run of the mill policier TV series, and is married to Alain (Guillaume Canet), chief of a renowned publishing house caught up in the throes of techno upheaval.
Léonard Spiegel (Vincent Macaigne) is a novelist who writes what he describes as “auto-fiction,” largely derived from his real life and often dealing with his extramarital relationships. Leonard expresses unconventional, antiestablishment views and is, perhaps, Jewish. He is married to Valerie (Nora Hamzawi) – a dedicated political aide of a Socialist Party (like books, another endangered species) politician – while Leonard’s viability as a writer is threatened by the digital onslaught being unleashed against book publishing.
This phenomenon is personified by Laure (Christa Théret, who interestingly appeared in Costa-Gavras’ 2005 look at outsourcing, The Axe, and is co-starring in the upcoming The Fox, presumably an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel), hired by Alain to bring his prestigious but conventional publishing house kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Quite cleverly, this tech savvy sexy young woman who has one foot in the print world and the other in cyberspace is bisexual.
This being a French film, most of the married characters have affairs – but unlike Woody Allen’s movies which abound with couple-fluid partnering up, Non-Fiction isn’t very funny. It is intended to be more of a drama than a comedy, although it does have some lighter moments, and Leonard in particular can be amusing. Interestingly, the various spouses are never depicted having sex with their married partners – only with the lovers they are being unfaithful with. What is Assayas essaying to say in this rumination on adultery, love, sex, marriage and literature?
In any case, Non-Fiction also evinces lefty undercurrents and according to IMDB.com, Assayas’ next production, Wasp Network, is another politically themed movie about five Cuban political prisoners inside the USA, co-starring Ramirez, Penelope Cruz and Gael Garcia Bernal. When I interviewed Assayas circa 2012 about his post-May ’68 film Something in the Air (called Après Mai in French), I asked him: “Does part of you still dream and hope there could be a revolution?”
Olivier Assayas responded: “Yes. But as much as I believe in those political movements, as much as they give one hope, because it gives a notion that youth again believes that it can have a collective effect on society, the way they envision politics is very different from whatever the 1970s’ were. Because for good or bad the 1970s were Utopian. The 1970s believed in the possibility of turning society upside down, of taking over. It was Utopian, but then it had some sort of reality because at least in France we had a model, which was May ’68, which was like three years old, and it comes as close as it gets to being an actual revolution. So, yes, this dream of a revolution, it was Utopian, but then it was also grounded into something that had actually happened, that had a solid reality. Today, people don’t think of a revolution. They think of adapting society, of making the hope of more fairness, more justice, more social justice, more generosity, which are old things – the modern world has become so brutal that of course, you have to recognize and endorse. But in the 1970s it would have been called ‘reformist,’ which was an insult.”
I don’t understand why Mexican auteur Alfonso Cuarón’s (2001’s Y Tu Mama Tambien) new semi-autobiographical film is called Roma, because it is set in Mexico City, not Rome, and it isn’t about the people that have also been called “Gypsies.” But be that as it may, this 2 hour, 15 minute black and white feature shot in widescreen is not so much about Cuaron, but about his petit-bourgeois family’s live-in maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). She is a young indigenous woman from the countryside (at one point we hear that the government is taking her mother’s land away from her), devoted to caring for Cuaron’s fair skinned family and their household.
The film slowly, deliberately unfolds with what seems to be mundane details. Roma is a bit Fellini-esque – that Italian genius even co-wrote/directed a 1972 feature also named Roma. But the Fellini film Cuaron’s ode to his childhood memories most reminds me of is Federico’s charming 1973 Amarcord, which translates as “I Remember.” Having said that, for the most part Cuaron’s Roma doesn’t have characters as outrageous as the Fellini-esque inhabitants of the maestro’s movies.
Fermín (superbly crafted by newcomer Jorge Antonio Guerrero) is an exception. His actions in the few scenes he appears in delineate and hone in on his character as a complete cad, who Cleo – perhaps starving and yearning for romance – makes the mistake of getting involved with. The superhero-like Professor Zovek, appropriately played by a professional wrestler whose ring name (and the one used in the credits) is “Latin Lover,” is another madcap Fellini-esque character.
As Cleo, Aparicio plays the dark-skinned domestic in a Neo-Realist manner, as someone with both feet firmly on the ground. Roma is a story that gains mounting momentum and has a cumulative effect. Cleo is swept up in a student demonstration with cataclysmic effects that your plot spoiler adverse reviewer won’t divulge. But it is absolutely one of the most heart wrenching sequences viewers are likely to see onscreen nowadays. Later, the diminutive Cleo, who doesn’t know how to swim, is faced with a do or die situation at a beach with pounding waves.
Cuaron’s beautiful homage to the servant who helped raise him won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, while Cuaron himself won Venice’s SIGNIS Award. I imagine the Spanish language Roma with English subtitles is a strong contender for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, while Aparicio deserves a Best Acting Academy Award. Since the heyday of Italian Neo-Realism, Roma is one of the best films ever made outside of the socialist world about a humble domestic, full of simple heroism, humanity and dignity, with an indigenous female in the lead role.
Aparicio’s beautifully drawn character may just be a salt of the Earth, modest maid, but man – this Cleo is a Cleopatra.
Roma theatrically opens Nov. 21 and will be streamed on Netflix starting Dec. 14.
For more info: (www.afi.com/afifest/).
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and he co-authored The Hawaii Movie and Television Book, now in its third edition.
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2018
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