The truth is Deneuve is just fabulous
The Truth
106mins PG
★★★★✩
CATHERINE Deneuve is so good it hurts in this dramedy from Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda. The 76-year-old actress looks as fit as a fiddle. But if this turns out (due to the stalling of film-making by coronavirus) to be her last major role, it would be an absolutely fabulous note to end on.
She’s Fabienne, a legendary Parisian film star, obsessed by her brilliant career, who claims not to care that she’s been a “bad mother” to her only child, caustic scriptwriter Lumir (Juliette Binoche; poignant).
The film revolves around Fabienne’s recently-written memoir, titled La Verite — which, it turns out, is a pack of lies. Lumir arrives to celebrate the book’s publication, with her young daughter, Charlotte (Clementine Grenier; adorable) and American actor husband, Hank (Ethan Hawke; droll).
Fabienne, all lustrous yellow locks and leopard-print coat, is nosey. She asks, excitedly, how many times a day Lumir and Hank have sex (“Twice? Three times?) before declaring, cruelly, “No, you’re too old for that.”
Deneuve is sending up her own image as a hard-to-please diva. How meta: Fabienne is her real middle name. As for Kore-eda, this is the first film he’s shot outside his native Japan and he can’t speak French (he wrote the script in Japanese, then worked with translator Lea Le Dimna). Yet, arguably, it’s one of his most personal projects.
Kore-eda cared for his mum as she lay dying. Soon afterwards, he cast the sublime Kirin Kiki as a powerful matriarch in Still Walking. The pair worked together on five more films (including Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters) before a dying Kiki told Kore-eda he should “go and work with younger people”. He turned to Deneuve.
Some especially wonderful sequences show Fabienne on the set of an indie sci-fi movie. In the film-within-a-film, a mother is immortalised by space travel. As the years pass, the mother is unchanged, while her daughter goes from giddy child to lonely crone. Fabienne, cast as the crone, is jealous of Manon (Manon Clavel), the rising star who plays the tantalising mum. We brace ourselves for an All About Eve (or even Sunset Boulevard-ish) showdown. But Kore-eda, wisely, takes a different direction.
Deneuve has eyes like a Manga character and those huge and lovely orbs swell with tears as Fabienne and Manon perform a scene in which mother and daughter connect. The Truth, though it’s concerned with the minutiae of an actor’s life, is universal. It’s hard to be a good parent. It’s easy to feel like a motherless child. Deneuve’s tears ... they’re enough to make anyone weep.
⬤ Available at curzon homecinema.com