Summary
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s follow-up to Shoplifters navigates familiar familial tensions in a whole new pond, applying the same grace and nuance he has throughout his career.
What do you do after your film wins the Palme d’Or? If you’re Hirokazu Kore-eda, then you continue doing what you’ve always done and apply the same delicate and intimate touch to European cinemas as some of his best work in Japan.
THE TRUTH (or LA VÉRITÉ if you prefer) orbits, in a very literal and figurative sense, around Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), a grand dame of French cinema. Her screenwriting daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) returns to Paris with her failing TV actor husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) to celebrate the publication of Fabienne’s memoirs.
The proximity of the mother and daughter exacerbates the tension underlying their prior estrangement, bringing out conversations about the past and some ‘truths’ hidden in plain sight. Both speak of an absent figure named Sarah who loomed large in their lives, and it slowly emerges that Fabienne is held captive by this part of her past.
Given that writer/director has said this was based on a play he wrote 15 years earlier, some of the Kore-eda themes and motifs that have since emerged are evident in THE TRUTH. There are unquestionably pieces of other films in there: Still Walking’s dinner table and general denial of the past; the flexible truths of The Third Murder and the child/family dynamic of…well, all of them up to an including last year’s Shoplifters. Yet to call this a pastiche would be a disservice to the multi-faceted screenplay.
As the film’s title would imply, this is a layered film that explores the notion of objective truth and being held captive by memories of the past. Kore-eda constructs a secondary narrative inside the movie to illustrate this – Fabienne stars in a sci-fi adaptation of a story by Ken Liu. In it, the character of the terminally ill young mother (played by Manon Clavel) lives in space to elongate her life. Visiting her daughter every seven years, she watches her daughter age while she remains the same age. It’s no stretch to see this as a mirror image to Kore-eda’s story, but it would have been interesting to see how his original choice of Raymond Carver’s Cathedral played out.
Kore-eda’s powerhouse cast, who were amazingly his first choices for the roles, all take a very different approach to his Japanese repertory. At a Q&A in Sydney he spoke about an inability to let things be as understated as they were in a Japanese context, with emotions forced to the fore giving him no choice but to to ‘hold the moment’ as it were. At other times, the characters spontaneously start to dance outside a Parisian café, and it’s hard to imagine that happening in one of his Tokyo settings. “The one thing the Japanese won’t do is dance,” he joked at the same Q&A event. Deneuve, of course, is at her magnificently shady best and surely awards aren’t far behind.
During a difficult part of Fabienne’s shoot, Lumir counsels her “For once admit defeat and let the film win.” Perhaps this is where Kore-eda settled, finding the middle ground between his past work and a new playground. There is levity and there is sadness in this film, and he seems to be saying that the very act of recalling subtly changes memories. In that spirit, THE TRUTH is a film that warrants several visits to fully unpick all its intricate strands.
2019 | France/Japan| DIRECTOR: Hirokazu Kore-eda | WRITERS: Hirokazu Kore-eda | CAST: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Ludivine Sagnier, Manon Clavel | DISTRIBUTOR: Palace Films (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 26 December 2019 (AUS), 25 December 2019 (France)
