After the Japanese director Hirokazu Ee won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with "The Thief Family" in 2018, all fans are looking forward to what surprises his next work will bring. Unexpectedly, he chose to shoot a French film to challenge another peak in his directorial career. Many Asian authors and directors shooting non-native language films have encountered Waterloo. From Wang Kar-wai to Naomi Kawase, they are all shocking models. The difference in understanding between Eastern and Western cultures and poorly considered scripts are often the inducements for the failure of the work. It's that Yu Kee and this new film "The Truth" was said to have been rejected by Cannes last year, and it began to make people worry about whether the director was caught in the "Palme of Palme Curse". The film was later selected for the Venice competition and became the opening film. After watching this suspected "missing work" recently, all the previous suspicions have disappeared.
In his first non-native language work, Hirokazu completely overcomes the symptoms of "inadequacy" common to Asian directors, and presents a French family ethics film to fans. The film is talked about by a superstar female star in the French film world. Her daughter brought her husband and children back to Paris to celebrate because of her memoirs published. The warm reunion of the mother and daughter quickly turned into a quarrel of accusing each other, and the love and hatred between the two were completely exposed to everyone. In addition to the two core protagonists of the mother and daughter, the male servants, current husbands and ex-husbands around the female celebrities have also appeared on the stage, joining the battle from time to time. It is a lively family drama, unknowingly watching Assayas’s "Summer Time or New Wave director Alan Raynay’s bustling experimental drama themes.
It is an unprecedented time to see two generations of top French actresses in a movie to compare their acting skills. It was Hirokazu Kee's vision of choosing actors to be quite precise. Look at the female star role played by Catherine Deneuve in the film, isn't it just playing herself in her true colors? Her aggressive and aggressive personality makes her invincible in her career. On the other hand, because of her negligence in relationship with her daughter and her family, she becomes a bad mother full of lies in front of her daughter. The director is writing this script to completely arouse the audience's curiosity and desire to "peep" in the private life of French female stars. On stage, the female stars who are infinitely beautiful and invincible, will their private lives be equally happy and happy, or are they going to the opposite side, and the people betrayed their relatives. Family in the cold? This kind of plot that is close to the eight o'clock series has always had a natural appeal to the public, but Hirokazu Kee did not over-exaggerate the arguing and quarrel plots between mother and daughter, which turned the film into a bloodthirsty battle. Under the surface of this almost messy French story, there is still the topic of blood ties that the director has always been good at. This can be described as his ultimate killer. As the so-called "dragon begets dragon and phoenix", this old-fashioned topic has been repeatedly presented in his previous works. "As Father Like Son", "Haijie Diary", and "Thief Family" have long become his exclusive author labels.
In this new work, it is not limited to the mantra or daily hobbies of showing the similarity between mother and daughter. It is Hirokazu Ke skillfully using the structure of a play in a play to express the estrangement and reconciliation between the mother and daughter. Deneuve plays other people's daughters in the play. Her mother has been young because of living in space for a long time, while her daughter is gradually aging. In the interpretation of the last scene, Deneuve experienced the root of his bad relationship with his daughter in real life through the empathy of the mother-daughter relationship, and finally confessed the "truth" to her daughter. This sci-fi in-play drama not only enhances the interest of the plot, but also more accurately projects the crux of the mother-daughter relationship in reality, making the narrative text present a pleasant intertextuality.
A female star who regards acting as the first in her life believes that the actor does not need to tell the truth to the audience. It is the highest state to act the fake into the real, which undoubtedly leads her to neglect the care of her family and children in real life. As a result, in a sci-fi film, she realized that she must put real feelings into the performance in order to impress the audience. This is a flash of inspiration when the relationship between her and her daughter is reconciled, which in turn seems to promote her acting career, which leads to The core topic of the film.
In fact, the "truth" in the film doesn't seem to be important. The important thing is to let the audience experience the misunderstanding and confrontation between the mother and daughter and return to normal. This kind of empathy and consensus in Eastern and Western cultures is the key to the success of this film. From the current point of view, it is Hirokazu Edema who is the most outstanding among a group of Asian writers and directors filming in a non-native language.
View more about The Truth reviews
