Opiniões dos críticos

Non-Fiction feels breezy, but this is a film in which, on multiple fronts, appearances don’t tell the whole story. Beneath its apparent lightness is something much thornier: a parable of integrity, compromise and betrayal.

The disjunction between Non-Fiction’s relaxed tenor and the dizzying velocity of its discourse is the film’s defining tension. In this, Binoche’s performance, which finds a precise distance from the script’s sexual/intellectual antics, is the ideal complement.

Maybe Jarmusch and Assayas’s generation of arthouse directors feels trapped by storytelling and wants to leave it behind. The Lettrist ending of Assayas’s Irma Vep pointed in that direction; in the years since, Assayas has become a more conventional filmmaker.

Assayas, one of the most important and inventive living filmmakers, has more on his mind than just a My Dinner With Andre-style talkfest. Non-Fiction is not only about the subjects it declares itself to be about; it's a subtle meditation on what it means to navigate them in a world where the line between public and private self seems increasingly blurred.

In Non-Fiction, he generates plenty of atmosphere, but it’s suffocating. This would-be truth-telling movie lives up—or down—to his title: In scene after scene, it cultivates a realism that’s convincing without revealing very much at all.

Assayas’s failure to offer critique means that he doesn’t supply the moral exemplar or catharsis of truly great cinema. Non-Fiction ought to be the movie of the year, but by flattering the squalid lives of the arbiters of Fake News, it fails.

Non-Fiction is as close as Assayas, a great style mimic, has gotten to Eric Rohmer—an admirable goal for a work about the vicissitudes of romantic relationships.

The movie’s very subject is the defense of a system that protects Assayas, no less than Léonard, from independent outsiders and upstarts, by treating them as national resources and luxury goods. The movie sells the same fantasy: the veneer of old-fashioned, old-world culture, without any level of difficulty.

This is a sexy, fun film filled with a lot of zingers, but it also feels a little less personal than many of Assayas’ movies, perhaps in part because it’s not stuffed to the gills with songs he loves.

A mostly delightful, occasionally exhaustingly word-drunk comedy of manners larded with giddy farce.

Non-Fiction is a constant surprise, from its seductive visuals to its slippery story lines and witty dialogue.

Either this is a comedy of adultery disguised as a meditation on the future of civilization, or the reverse. It’s pretty good fun either way, though it’s also very much a symptom of the condition it diagnoses, namely the profound complacency of the cultural elite (in France, but of course not only in France).