Diva’s to tell daughter gets home truths
With cinemas closing, now is the perfect time to discover the convenience of home streaming movies
THE TRUTH ★★★★
(Cert PG, 107mins, available from today on Curzon Home Cinema)
THE Truth was due in cinemas today but will now premiere exclusively on the Curzon Home Cinema platform, a base for exploring subtitled classics and new releases.And as this is a French film by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, you get two foreign cultures for the price of one.
This is Kore-eda’s first film shot outside his home country but there’s a Japanese sensibility here in the way he invites us to observe the details of his character’s relationships.
However, there’s nothing understated about his main character Fabienne Dangeville, a diva-ish French icon played by 76-year-old French icon Catherine Deneuve.
Deneuve is best known for her work with Jacques Demy and Louis Buñuel in the 60s and 70s but she has been working ever since.This is her juiciest role in decades. She delivers a fearless performance that’s terrifying, funny and touching.
Fabienne’s self-aggrandising autobiography The Truth is about to be published and her screenwriter daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) has flown to Paris from Los Angeles, hoping to cast her eyes over a copy.
“This is not the truth!” she snarls after reading a very different account of her upbringing. Fabienne is unrepentant. “I’d prefer to be a bad mother, a bad friend, but a great actress,” she says.
Lumir has arrived in the French capital with her American husband Hank (Ethan Hawke), a TV actor just out of rehab, and their daughter
Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier). They are invited to a film studio to witness the great Fabienne playing alongside a young ingénue in a science-fiction film.
It tells the story of a slow-ageing mother who beams down to earth from a space station to visit her daughter at key stages in her life. If this were a Hollywood movie, the role would teach Fabienne a lesson and tee up a happy ending. It does lead to a thawing of her frosty relationship with her daughter, but this prima donna was never going to give up without a fight.
Kore-eda doesn’t deal in big showdowns or sudden epiphanies. This is drama built on compromises, regrets and resentments nursed quietly over decades.
You’ve probably never met anyone quite like Fabienne but her family is much like any other.