Olivier Assayas is a French director so full of himself and his own ego that keeps making self-indulgent and boring movies, that are huge failures both financially and artistically. This film did horribly at international film festivals, so there's barely any artistic value in it, except perhaps it's cinematography. The A-List cast deliver mediocre performances, poorly directed, and the accents are all over the place. The movie failed at getting any distribution deals throughout 2019, to finally settle for Netflix; simply cause no distributor saw any value in a 2hr plus painfully long narrative with no point of view. Assayas is so all over the place with the narrative and disorienting chronological jumps that not even the documentary style narrator's voice over can save it. Totally out of tone and anticlimactic to hear history channel style voice over in a narrative film.
Despite its historical inaccuracies, the movie fails to examine the most valuable dramatic conflict of all: How a self-discerning man who escapes a tyrannical dictatorship returns to it after experiencing the free world. That character study would be by far more dramatically rewarding that the mere archetypes this film presents. As in many more of his previous films, like "Carlos", Assayas is more interesting in set design, and signage accuracy than emotional accuracy, and the movie falls flat. It's a boring, long, waste of 2hrs.