A masterclass in self-parody from grande dame Catherine Deneuve
The truth hurts, so they say – and in The Truth it’s like toothache; an ambient nag that waits for the worst possible moment to twinge. The new film from Hirokazu Kore-eda – his first since last year’s tremendous
Shoplifters, which took the Palme d’or at Cannes – is a keenly observed, wit-stippled drama of extended family life. Opening this year’s turbocharged Venice Film Festival last night (forthcoming highlights include sci-fi epic Ad Astra and controversybaiting comic book, Joker), it felt like business as usual for the great Japanese director – although for the first time, this business was being conducted in English and French.
The first film Kore-eda has shot outside his homeland, The Truth unfolds in a pointedly autumnal Paris, where Fabienne, a none-grander dame of French cinema gamely and self-satirisingly played by Catherine Deneuve, is about to publish her tell-all memoir. Her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), on a rare visit from the US with her actor husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) and their daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier), leafs through it and is dismayed by what she reads – not because it’s too candid, but nowhere near candid enough.
Fabienne’s book is awash with omissions and self-serving confections, from made-up mother-daughter bonding to killing off her ex-husband
and Lumir’s father, Pierre (he’s still alive, and pops over). It also glosses over a significant figure: Sarah, a nowdeceased actress she once cheated out of a career-topping role by seducing the director. But in her current gig – an oddball sci-fi in which she plays the elderly daughter of a woman who
The film defaults to gentle comedy too often and feels afraid to draw blood
doesn’t age – she appears alongside a talented rising starlet (Manon Clavel), who reminds almost everyone of Sarah in her youth.
Fabienne disputes the likeness, but it has her rattled. “I keep growing older while she stays the same age,” she says irritably – in reference to their work, but also her yet-to-be-finalised image, compared to that of her rival and friend.
As ever with Kore-eda, The Truth is a film of beautifully turned moments, from the way Deneuve quietly steels herself with a cigarette to glances swapped by Binoche and Hawke. As for the potentially troublesome language barrier, Kore-eda twists it to his characters’ advantage, whose differing linguistic abilities allow them to mask sentiments and confer privately in public. (Hawke, the all-american monoglot, is repeatedly left high and dry in a nicely written and typically mouth-watering dinner scene that serves as a dramatic centrepiece.)
Yet the film defaults to gentle comedy too often, and feels afraid to dig deep into its underlying themes to draw blood. Fabienne wisecracks about old colleagues and reflects on mistakes, but there’s little sense she is reckoning with a legacy in the way Binoche did in Clouds of Sils Maria. That superb 2014 film laced engrossing existential riddles through its playful backstage drama – and as such, couldn’t have been further from The Truth.