Legitimately branching out onto the international waters after his Palme d'orprizewinner SHOPLIFTERS (2018), Hirokazu Koreeda reciprocates the Gallic goodwill and esteem with THE TRUTH, his 14th feature, a French-Japanese coproduction starring an almost exclusively Francophone cast, with one outlier in the person of Ethan Hawke.
The chief selling point, apart from the director's own immense prestige, is the collaboration between Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, French cinema's two most iconic stars of their generations, who are almost diametrical in terms of their screen charisma. In THE TRUTH, Deneuve plays Fabienne Dangeville, a Caesar Awards winning actress and Binoche is her estranged screenwriter daughter Lumir, who lives in USA with her actor husband Hank (Hawke), and they have a young daughter Charlotte (Grenier).
On the pretext of celebrating Fabienne's newly published memoir, Lumir's nuclear family crosses the ocean and visits her in their Paris family mansion, in the meantime, Fabienne is engaging in shooting a new film, in which she plays a daughter in her seventies whose mother has retained her youth by inhabiting the outer space entirely to fend off an unnamed disease (the plot is based on a short novel from Chinese-American Sci-Fi writer Ken Liu), the same scenario occurs in the coda of Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR (2014), when an elder woman has to say farewell to her father, who hasn't aged much since the day he embarks on an outpace expedition decades earlier. The bizarre, surreal sensation can be felt vicariously and universally.
Mise en abyme is the first thing comes to your reviewer's mind, not just because Deneuve seems to inherently play a version of herself - "Fabienne" is actually her middle name, who ascends to the top rung of the acting vocation, at the expense of almost everything else (maternal duty, matrimonial harmony, etc.), now her daughter returns from abroad with a mild grudge, especially after the latter discovers that in Fabienne's memoir, facts are completely editorialized at its subject's will -, but also in the movie -within-the-movie, it is Fabienne's own quest to reconcile with her (screen) mother that reflects the strained affinity she forges with Lumir, now, finally, it is high time for an egocentric prima donna, who has seldom deigned to bother the earthly worries,to descend from the pedestal (which means to take off the magical guise and reveal her true feelings), and perhaps it is not too late for Fabienne to find some domestic bliss in her wintry years.
That said, Koreeda, as per his modus operandi, palpably infuses a normalized, underplayed emotional undertow into their interpersonal drama, often dwelling only on the surface in his scalpel, only letting out a scintilla of emotion flickering in the eyes, or a tacit reaction with no words articulated. Intimate but never tell, the whole story coheres in a languid pace that perhaps feels more natural in a Japanese movie, but here, with the narrative mainly in Fabienne's cushy manse and the green-screened film set confined, the visual flair is irrefutably blunted compared with Koreeda's previous works, thankfully, the emotional core never abates, Deneuve is unrelentingly nonchalant most of the time as a matriarch who takes no one else's orders but hers,but even more captivating in the ambiguity she manages to convey through Fabienne's thinly-veiled state of agitation, discomfiture and maybe, a tint of regret. For those who has been watching the star's pictures for years, it is an illuminatingly touching performance from someone whose pictures elegance and detachment often comes first both in and out of character.
Binoche, as excellent as always, which goes without saying, buckles down as the passive-aggressive pusher, but also a tender mother and an affection wanting daughter, who tries to elicit Fabienne's maternal guilt and seek a reconciliation out of it, their final misty -eyed embrace is a powerful moment not solely in this film, but also in the French cinema at large; as for Hawke, who charmingly downplays his Americanness and effortlessly eases out the “lost in translation” part which Koreeda must deem rather obvious to include in the story, in the end doles out more humility than we are bargain for; lastly, Manon Clavel, who plays a namesake actress who plays the eternally youthful mother of Fabienne's movie character, brings such an ethereal presence and sophistication with her naturalistic penchant that is totally invigorating to watch.
Salted with a touch of pixie dust (the turtle's disappearance and reappearance is a master stroke to pull that trick frictionlessly), THE TRUTH holds realism (both emotionally and narratively) dearly at its heart, and Koreeda's anti-sensational methodology is true to his cause , but to burrow into the typical familial turbulence of the occidental leisure class, he might be hurt for more time to acclimate after this immediate sortie.
referential entries: Koreeda's SHOPLIFTERS (2018, 8.4/10); Ingmar Bergman's AUTUMN SONATA (1978, 8.4/10); Olivier Assayas' SUMMER HOURS (2008, 7.7/10).
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