Deneuve, Binoche face off in ‘Truth’
Film Kore-eda’s family drama opens Venice festival
VENICE, Italy, Aug 29, (RTRS): For his first movie directed outside of his native Japan, filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda travelled to Paris to work with two of France’s top leading ladies in “La Verite” (The Truth), a drama fraught with family tensions.
Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche face off as mother and daughter whose fragile relationship resurfaces as they reunite when the former publishes her memoirs.
The film, which opened the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, sees Deneuve, 75, plays Fabienne, a famed French actress whose career and tough exterior have long distanced her from her screenwriter daughter, Lumir.
When Lumir returns to Paris from New York with her husband, played by Ethan Hawke, and their young daughter, she challenges Fabienne about some hidden truths and painful memories.
“We thought it might be interesting to shoot in France, and you would need actresses to represent the history of the French film industry,” Kore-eda told a news conference via an interpreter.
“There is this family drama aspect but it is in reality the story of a relationship between mother and daughter. They have their own existence, they try to get on, accepting each other.”
Kore-eda is known for his family-focused work, including the critically-acclaimed “Shoplifters”, which won the prestigious Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
Deneuve, a French cinema veteran, said while the language barrier between the director and cast was difficult at first as an interpreter had to be present on set, the process worked well in the end as “only the essential” was shared.
The “Belle de Jour” star puts on a tough exterior to play Fabienne, a self-centered actress who refuses to apologise for her wrongdoings, acts petty when cast alongside a much younger rising star and is fearful her career may soon be over.
“What I put in of myself is what you usually put in when playing a role,” Deneuve said. “But this character is very different from me. Her world is very distant from mine. Her relationship with her daughter is obviously something that’s very distant to me as well.”
“The Truth” is one of 21 films competing for the festival’s top Golden Lion prize, which will be announced on Sept 7.
When a big, prestigious, internationally celebrated arthouse filmmaker, hoisted by his acclaim, gets the chance to make a “crossover” movie somewhere other than his native country (generally, though not always, the language spoken in the film will be English), it tends to seem like a great idea on paper, yet often doesn’t work out so well. Examples of this time-honored phenomenon range from Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Touch” to Wim Wenders’ “Hammett” to Asghar Farhadi’s recent “Everybody Knows” – movies in which you can hear the voice of the filmmaker, though not nearly as vividly as you did in the films that made his crossover possible.
Portrays
But “The Truth”, the first movie written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Shoplifters”) outside his native Japan, doesn’t fall into that more-mainstreamyet-lesser trap.
“The Truth”, which Kore-eda shot with a French crew, is set in Paris, and it’s one of those dramas in which a beloved, larger-than-life movie-star diva – in this case, Catherine Deneuve – portrays a beloved, larger-than-life movie-star diva. Which isn’t to suggest that Deneuve is playing some thinly veiled version of herself, only that the movie uses her image as one of the last of the mythical French screen goddesses to impart an impish sheen of authenticity to her portrayal of Fabienne Dangeville, a legendary, Cesar-winning French actress, now in her 70s, who approaches every moment with an I’m-still-here tenacity that’s at once heroic and steely, vibrant and borderline tyrannical. Deneuve, at 75, has never stopped working or even slowed down, yet she hasn’t had a role this delectable in years, and she gives a magnificent performance: grand, subtle, lacerating and fearless.
She makes Fabienne a proudly narcissistic and theatrical glamour puss who has no patience for the idea that she should pretend to be anything other than the devious, self-adoring prima donna she is. In the opening scene, she’s giving an interview to kick off the publicity blitz for her new memoir (it’s called “The Truth”), and there’s a wry amusement to the fact that she can’t recall whether several of her old frenemies are dead or alive. It’s not a fading-memory joke — it’s a this-is-what-total-selfabsorption-looks-like joke.
Yet Fabienne, as Deneuve plays her, is such a sly manipulator, so droll about her own royal ego, that we can’t help but feel drawn to her. Kore-eda’s dialogue is superb, suffused with the comedy of experience. (There’s a great bit in which Fabienne discusses actresses whose first and last names begin with the same letter, capped by Denueve’s priceless shrug at the mention of Brigitte Bardot.) As you watch “The Truth,” which is so spryly at home in the cosmopolitan air of its French movie-world setting, you feel as if it could have been made by the Olivier Assayas of “Summer Hours.” It’s that finely tuned.
And yet ... it’s very much, in the end, a Kore-eda film. Which is to say, it works by throwing the audience a series of highly refined dramatic curveballs that don’t necessarily add up to the movie you thought you were watching.
As Fabienne releases her memoir and gets ready to act in a new picture, she’s playing host to her daughter, Lumir (Juliette Binoche), a screenwriter based in New York, and Lumir’s husband, Hank (Ethan Hawke), a mediocre TV actor who is starting to have a bit of success. They’re a bohemian showbiz couple with a lovely daughter, Charlotte (Clementine Grenier), who’s around 8, and they seem like a serene domestic unit. We learn that Hank has stopped drinking (there’s an all-too-brief reference to the troubles that led to his going into rehab), but Hawke makes him a centered and loving presence, and Binoche does the same thing for Lumir -- except when it comes to her mother.