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. 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.
