As his new film Wasp Network hits
Netflix, delve into the French director’s wide-ranging back catalogue from Demonlover to Personal Shopper
Many film-makers dream of their name becoming its own adjective. Hitchcockian, Tarantinoesque, Lynchian: all terms (some of them even validated by the Oxford English Dictionary) that brand the signature aesthetic, tone and/or thematic fixations of one director and his various imitators. Not every great film-maker is suitable for this treatment, however: it would be difficult to adjectivise the French director Olivier Assayas, and not just because “Assayasesque” is rather a mouthful.
Forty years into his career, Assayas’s work can loosely be characterised by his cool, elegant formal style, but you’d be stretching to find many throughlines in an oeuvre that runs the gamut from muscular genre workouts to brittle comedies of manners, from tender naturalism to whirling avant-garde experimentation. He’s no workaday journeyman, but it’s clear he’d rather carve out an identity through contrast.