doubles vies (w&d olivier assayas)

Assayas is prolific. He’s one of those directors who makes almost a film a year. There aren’t many who manage to do this nowadays. (Allen, Eastwood, Winterbottom.) You need a well-oiled machine to be able to go through the whole process of development, financing, pre-production, production, post with such consistency. Studios are set up to do this, but individual directors generally aren’t. The problem with the machine is that there’s a danger that the product starts to feel like just like that. A product. And there’s a sense with Doubles Vies, for all its fleeting moments of brilliance, that this is just that. 

The film opens with a wordy, brilliant sequence where publisher Alain informs the novelist Leonard Spiegel that he’s not planning on publishing his new novel, but he does so in a roundabout, amiable fashion, inviting him to lunch before stabbing him in the back. The decision is taken in he context of where Alain’s publishing house is going, with much discussion about the destiny of the novel in the digital age, both as an idea and a tangible product. Alain is having a fling with his head of digital operations, the go-getting bisexual Laure. The film appears to be laying down all kind of markers, as an investigation into the shape of thought in the future; the value of the word; the death of the attention span. In which context the highly wordy script makes sense: the film is challenging an audience to pay attention, to roll with intellectual ideas, a revindication of cinema as a space of thought/ philosophy rather than pure entertainment. There’s a lovely running joke about Haneke’s White Ribbon as well as a mediation on the ethics of auto-fiction, which might have struck a nerve with the Uruguayan audience. 

And yet, beneath all this, Doubles Vies ends up a very traditional French sex-comedy. Everyone is sleeping with someone else. The deceit stacks up and is mined for comedy. The ideas don’t really go anywhere, or if they do, it’s over this viewer’s head. The final pay-off is unadulterated sentimentalism. This is a bouillabaisse of Frenchness, pungent, reliable, a heartwarming dish. It reaffirms the tropes that the french are intellectual lovers, who drink in elegant bars whilst talking with aplomb about les idées du jour. Whether there’s any real substance behind all this is another matter altogether.