TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

IN THE CINEMA OF OLIVIER ASSAYAS, WE FIND A LABORATORY OF THE world. His ’90s features Cold Water (1994), Irma Vep (1996), and Late August, Early September (1998) were made on Super 16mm to liberate filmmaking from the weight of unwieldy state-of-the-art technologies of the day, forging an intuitive, naturalistic style that gave way to more direct explorations of autofiction, metafiction, and melodrama. This self-conceived freedom has manifested in vastly dissonant genres, shape-shifting in atmosphere, form, and format. (2002) exploded the all-pervasive sense of perilous Y2K doom into a series of S&M-inflected exploits crosshatching the globe, while in the quietly heart-wrenching mid-career (2008), a rumination on heirlooms left behind by a deceased matriarch served to condense collective memories and familial history and distill the murky liminality and perishability of lived time into scenes of elegant bucolic beauty. Anticipating the age of auteurist television, (2010) extrapolated the singular figure of Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal into a six-hour espionage thriller, canvassing domestic, civic, and geopolitical strata, and hewing its contours to the sprawl of historical transition during the Cold War. Throughout this varied career, Assayas’s cinema has remained ensconced in deeply humanist contemplations of the way people relate to one another and their environments, propelled by a razor-sharp inquisitiveness toward ever-changing cultural and technological landscapes.