Oliver Assayas 2: _Late August, Early September_
sept...@millenicom.com
film I have a video of) is such a frustrating experience.
It has an amazing, likable cast (Mathieu Almaric, Virginie
Ledoyen, Jeanne Balibar, Alex Descas, ...) The details
about the mid echelon intelligentsia community, including
the petty jealousy, the unstable pecking order among
struggling writers, the personality cults; everything is
spot on. You wonder how much of the film came from first
hand experience, was autobiographical: the actress who plays
the dying mandarin's teenage girlfriend is now Assayas'
fiancee (according to the imdb). Assayas is right to
remind us that the intellectual enterprises of arts and
letters take place in a community, which has a marketplace
of its own.
Yet _Late August, Early September_ also has that smug,
self-satisfied, self-congratulatory tone that alienates
me from so many of Assayas' films. At its conclusion,
the protagonist played by Mathieu Almalric, now a player
in the publishing world, denigrates his dead former best
friend and mentor's novel as "minor." Meanwhile, after
ghostwriting a politician's memoir, he is awarded with
financial security, a nice apartment, a trophy wife
(Virginie Ledoyen), and is now thinking about writing
a "novel." After so much selling out, what kind of a
novel would that be? (Seomthing like the story of the
film itself?) Which brings us to the Achilles' heel of
_Late August_ -- we never see or hear anything anyone
has written. Artists (especially struggling ones) tend
to be self-centered; their finest moments find them
honing their craft. The film, alas, describes their
work second hand, in a smug and knowing way. ("Rambling
about time and memory.") In _Summer Hours_, at least
genuine art objects are depicted so we can see for ourselves.
Assayas has always gotten the kid-glove treatment from
U.S. critics. Just as _Summer Hours_ was likened
to Jean Renoir_, the talky _Late August_, decorated with
title cards, was compared to Eric Rohmer in the NY Times.
(While it is tempting to blame all lazy reviews on A.O.
Scott, this may have been in the Janet Maslin era.)
But Rohmer's writers brilliantly exercise their gift as
story tellers in _Claire's Knee_, and provide a poetic,
moving exploration of their desires and missed
opportunities. More recently, Rohmer's mathematician
and amateur song-writer writes sea-chanties for his
girlfriends in the much underrated _A Tale of Summer_.
I happened to have read _A Movable Feast_. It is of
course about Hemingway's early years in Paris, where he
emphasizes the hard discipline of writing, the sacrifices
he (and his wife) made so he can get through so many
words a morning, the need to avoid temptations, including
rich folks' flattery. _Late August_ instead lingers focuses
the writers' insecurity, pot-smoking, their lunches of
Vietnamese noodle and Asian beer, and their holdings of semi-
precious paintings. It is a portrait of bohemians and
their entourage as celebrities. Assayas wants us to envy
this in-crowd. But this co-dependence is deadly when
starting artists are trying to find their own voices. The
young Hemingway would have warned against it. Assayas
will portray many artists and artisans in his later films:
the squabbling film crew in _Irma Vep_ (they have so
little joy in filmmaking compared those in _Day for Night_);
Maggie Cheung's bad techno singer and recovering drug
addict (only Assayas could have made Cheung so unmemorable,
save for one scene where she slums aruond as a waitress in
her uncle's Chinese resturant); Charles Berling's porcelain
merchant in _Les Destinees_; and the video game
pornographers in _Demonlover_. But he has never had
the guts to portray someone world-class. Not surprising,
when his altar-egos in _Late August, Early September_
are so readily forgiven for their sloth and mediocrity.
Improbably, the only poetic dialogs in the film are given
to the outsider played by Virginie Ledoyen. This is
towards the end where she describes her soul-searching
in London. In the film, she starts out being portrayed
condescendingly as a shallow, working class tramp, a
lottery-ticket-scratching drama queen. She ends up being
the most self-aware of the lot, the only character who
has grown in stature and depth. The camera loves her, is
attuned to her every mood swing; it flatters her swirling
dream-trance with intimate close ups, and the soft
glow of street lamps and neon signs dance in her wake.
At those moments she reminds me of a rare flame-seeking
moth living to the fullest a one-day adult lifespan. Ledoyen is
far from being the best actor here (or even one of my
favorites), but her presence in these one or two scenes
truly redeem the film. In those all-too-rare moments in
his career, Assayas fulfills the promise of his talents.
Is the Ledoyen character a metaphor for American art-house
critics, always in bed with Assayas no matter how lazy and
unambitous his work is? Or perhaps it is the other way
round, that the undeserved praise is what doomed him to
his inability to exert himself in the first place? Assayas
clearly has talents. Nor does he lack imagination, however
misplaced (see _Demonlover_). He seems heads and shoulders
above his fellow art-house auteur-anointee Arnaud Desplecin,
whose _A Christmas Tale_ would have been rightly dismissed
as a TV-sitcom-informed Sundance concoction were it shot
in English and didn't star Catherine Deneuve. (Some
people I know do like _Esther Kahn_, a film I never
understand.) At the end of _Late August, Early September_,
instead of throwing herself yet again into the lukewarn
arms of Almaric (who has already dumped her once),
the Ledoyen character should have slapped him around. She
has outgrown him, and he could badly use a wake-up call.
Since I've been asked to compare Assayas and Techine,
the last installment will be about the two Techine's films
Assayas co-wrote.