Hirokazu Kore-eda is undoubtedly one of the most interesting
film-directors alive and making films today. His talent to write an original script is just
awesome. His scripts are so diverse in subject matter and yet linked by two
common threads: family ties and
importance of ethics in life. Only a few of his films have original scripts
written by someone else. He is remarkably close in his treatments of varied
chosen subjects to the works of Naomi Kawase, another contemporary Japanese
filmmaker, who also prefers to write her own original scripts. Perhaps it is
more than a coincidence that French actress Juliette Binoche is the star of both their latest films: Kore-eda’s The Truth and Kawase’s Vision (2018).
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| Fabienne (Deneuve, left) is the mother and Lumir (Binoche, right) is her daughter |
The Truth presents a tale of an aging and reputed French
actress Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) who is rich enough to spend decades in
outer space to counteract natural aging and return to Earth to continue her
acting career looking younger than her age. This obviously means her relationship
with her biological daughter Lumir (Binoche), who is now a film scriptwriter,
is punctuated by 10 year gaps for the sake of her own vanity. The preposterous
10 year “sojourn” in “outer space” idea is a typical fantasy of Kore-eda that
one encounters in his films occasionally. The Truth is another original
screenplay of Kore-eda making his first non-Japanese language feature film with
Lea Le Dimna, providing him with the French and English translation of his
written script. The Truth is showcased at the Denver International Film
Festival, USA, that kicks off later this month. American audiences at the
festival will be delighted to find Ethan Hawke in The Truth playing the role of Lumir’s American
husband Hank, a TV actor getting good reviews in a recently completed TV series
back home.
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| Three generations of the family: Lumir (Binoche) and Fabienne (Deneuve, foreground) as daughter and mother; Hank the son-in-law (Ethan Hawke) and granddaughter Charlotte (Clementine Greniere) seated behind |
In the film, The Truth, Kore-eda focuses once again on
family ties, predominantly on the mother-daughter relationship taking centre
stage. Ethics are also discussed in passing (Fabienne’s destruction of a rival actress’
career using unethical means) but those small details discussed in passing could
easily be missed out by casual viewers.
What is disturbing in this film is not its content but the
parallels from other major works of cinema which make you scratch you head to
recall whether you had seen it all before. The tale of a daughter returning with her new husband after a long
hiatus to her house where she grew up, only to unravel bits and pieces of past
and present in her family are remarkably close to Luchino Visconti’s Venice Golden
Lion winning film Sandra (1965). The apprehensions of an aging famous actress
not being able to impress in front of the camera and being increasingly forgetful of her lines while shooting is
remarkably close to the story of John Cassavetes’ Berlin’s Silver Bear winner Opening Night
(1977) with his wife Gena Rowlands impressing us just as much as Ms Deneuve does in The Truth. On the other hand, Ms Deneuve gives us a
magnificent performance in The Truth, to the extent we are constantly hypnotized by the
two wonderful lead actresses, Deneuve and Binoche facing off their turbulent
mother-daughter relationships. Kore-eda
also introduces within the film the filming of Fabienne’s recently published
autobiography as added fodder to make the screenplay richer and provide yet
another dimension for Deneuve to project herself with subtle differences in the film within the film.
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| A rare scene of the city of Paris in the film detailing the relationship between the second and third generations (left to right: Binoche, Greniere and Hawke) |
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| The hairdo of Fabienne, a likely homage to Tarkovsky's Mirror |
In the middle of The Truth the viewer’s attention is led by the
clever script to Fabienne’s hair and how it’s combed differently by daughter
and granddaughter. Then the camera
captures Fabienne’s hairdo taken from behind her head that will remind any
cineaste of Andrei Tarkovsky's mother’s hairdo while sitting on a fence in Mirror
(1975), a sequence which was recreated in homage much later by Turkish director
Semih Kaplanoglu in his film Milk (2008).
In both the Russian and the Turkish films the subject is the son’s (director’s)
view of their mothers. In The Truth, too,
it is a perspective of the relationship between mother and daughter and granddaughter,
using hair as a visual focal point.
If we discount the similarities to the two earlier films, The
Truth offers awesome performances (Deneuve, Binoche, and Hawke, in particular) and a very intelligent script
that dissects relationships within families. As in most Kore-eda feature films,
the subject of The Truth is not limited to a single generation but presents
interactions between three generations—which is why the film offers much fodder
for thought than is obvious. Even as this writer is a Kore-eda fan who has watched 13 of his
14 feature films, The Truth is not his most rewarding film—three other films The
Third Murder (2017), Shoplifters (2018) and Maborosi (1995), are far superior. But The Truth is well worth your time, if you
like Kore-eda, Visconti or Cassavetes.
P.S. Kore-eda’s The Third Murder and Kawase’s Vision (2018)
have earlier been reviewed on this blog. The reviews of Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975)
and Kaplanoglu’s Milk (2008.) can also be accessed on this blog by clicking on the
names of the films on this post-script. The author’s list of the best 15 active filmmakers includes Kore-eda. The author's ranking of the 13 Kore-eda films can
be viewed here. The Truth is among the author's top 20 films of 2019.
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