Monthly Archives: March 2020

  • The Truth

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La vérité

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2019)

    Hirokazu Kore-eda is renowned for his exploration of family relationships.  To that extent, The Truth is no exception:  it focuses on abiding tensions between a mother and daughter.  The characters in Kore-eda’s Japanese films, though various in their social standing, jobs and other roles, haven’t been celebrities.  This new picture – which is also the first that Kore-eda has made outside Japan, with a non-Asian cast and not in his native language – is different.  The Truth’s aging protagonist is an enduringly famous film star.  Her middle-aged daughter is a screenwriter (how successful or high-profile isn’t clear).  The mother pretends for a living, the daughter makes up words for other people to speak.  The film’s title, also the title of the mother’s about-to-be-published autobiography, is at least partly ironic.  As might be expected in the story of these two women, Kore-eda explores the uses and limits of dissimulation.

    At the start of The Truth, Fabienne Dangeville (Catherine Deneuve) is being interviewed in her Paris home by a nervously obsequious journalist (Laurent Capelluto).  The interview is aborted by the arrival from New York of ‘my daughter and her little family’, as Fabienne disparagingly describes them to the journalist.  Lumir (Juliette Binoche) is accompanied by her American husband Hank (Ethan Hawke), a TV actor, and their small daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier).  The three are making a rare visit to France to celebrate the publication of Fabienne’s book.  As they approach her grand house, Charlotte says it looks like a castle; Lumir notes there’s a prison just behind it.  She’s hardly through the door before she’s anxiously reminding Fabienne of a broken promise to let her read the memoir prior to publication.  When Fabienne replies briskly that a copy of the manuscript was sent to New York (‘You must have missed it’), Lumir says, uncomfortably but candidly, ‘You don’t want me to read it’. A few screen minutes later, she’s furiously annotating an advance copy, and complaining to her mother that ‘The Truth’ is a tissue of lies, designed purely to show Fabienne in a good light.

    In Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978), Charlotte, an internationally famous concert pianist, comes to stay at the country parsonage where her elder daughter Eva lives with her pastor husband and cares for a seriously disabled younger sister.  The reunion doesn’t go well or last long.  After a series of bad dreams and a wrenching showdown with Eva, who condemns her mother’s selfish neglect of her family over the decades, Charlotte takes her leave, hardly more than a day after arriving.  Autumn Sonata isn’t a great film but the flying visit is credible.  From an early stage, The Truth’s reverse set-up – with the diva mother hosting the reproachful daughter – is harder to accept.  Lumir is apparently so diffident that, even at a transatlantic distance, she daren’t query by phone or email why she hasn’t received Fabienne’s manuscript.  Once she’s in her mother’s presence, though, Lumir is ready to argue the toss.  In her book, Fabienne has faked happy memories of coming to meet her daughter from school when she was a little girl, something that Lumir claims never happened.  ‘The Truth’ fails even to mention the late actress Sarah Mondavan, an important figure in both their lives.  Angered by such invention and omission, Lumir nevertheless, and implausibly, sticks around – to take part in the hypocritical ‘celebration’ which it’s a surprise she signed up for in the first place.

    Of course, if she doesn’t stick around there’s no story and Kore-eda relies on other improbabilities to move things forward and sustain his characters’ retrospection.  Luc (Alain Libolt), Fabienne’s long-standing and long-suffering assistant, is another who doesn’t rate a mention in the memoir.  Having loyally taken shit from his employer for forty years, he now resigns without a minute’s notice, more or less obliging Lumir to step in and hold her mother’s hand – accompanying her to a film shoot, and so on.  Fabienne got rid of her daughter’s father Pierre when Lumir was a girl.  The child’s revenge was to give his name to the pet turtle that, now ancient, still roams Fabienne’s gardens.  Then the human Pierre (Roger Van Hool) turns up.  It isn’t clear how often this happens or what sort of contact he has with Fabienne.  (Her current man, Jacques (Christian Crahay), shares her bed and does the cooking:  Fabienne tells Lumir he’s a better chef than he is a lover.)  But it helps Kore-eda having Pierre around, as the family rake over the past.

    Fabienne is shooting a science fiction movie called ‘Memories of My Mother’.  As its title proclaims, the themes of this film-within-the-film resonate with those of The Truth.  ‘Memories of My Mother’ is the science fiction story of a mother-daughter relationship.  Throughout the daughter’s life, the mother has repeatedly spent long spells away from her child:  fearful of getting old, she has kept taking herself off into deep space, in order to arrest the aging process.  As a result, the daughter now looks old enough to be her mother’s mother.  Fabienne, who plays the daughter, has second billing.  In the lead role of the perennially youthful mother is Manon Lenoir (Manon Clavel), a new superstar of French cinema.  Although she tries to maintain her usual hauteur, Fabienne is revealed to be vulnerable in Manon’s presence, on and off set.  The effect is a bit like seeing Margo Channing resigned to co-starring in an Eve Harrington stage vehicle.

    That All About Eve allusion touches on an essential feature of Kore-eda’s film.  Although I watched it with next to no prior knowledge (I’d seen the trailer a couple of times but hadn’t read either background articles or reviews), I wondered from the start if The Truth might be prove to be chiefly an expression of Kore-eda’s feelings for cinema cultures other than his own and his pleasure in working with eminent representatives of those cultures.  And I think this is what The Truth turns out to be.  Seeing the film in terms of what its components may mean to the director makes it more likeable than it would otherwise be but it’s still disappointing.  Kore-eda clearly doesn’t expect his audience to find the sci-fi movie aspect remarkable for its subtlety but the too easily read meanings of ‘Memories of My Mother’ are typical of The Truth as a whole.

    Chain-smoking Fabienne may be a conscious cliché on Kore-eda’s part but she’s still a cliché – the latest in a long line of fictional famous actors, self-serving monsters who’ll stop at nothing to push their rivals out of their way.  Lumir blames her mother not only for stealing from Sarah Mondavan the role that landed Fabienne a Best Actress César but also for Sarah’s very premature death.  Fabienne isn’t ashamed to tell Lumir she would rather ‘be a bad mother, a bad friend but a good actress’.  According to type, she combines ruthless egotism with childish dependency in all things practical.  (Jacques makes her tea as well as her dinner.  Fabienne either complains the tea is lukewarm or yells that it’s burned her mouth.)  She’s also scared, of course, by the thought that her acting powers are failing – even though her work on the ‘Memories of My Mother’ set eventually proves they’re not.  Even so, Manon Lenoir is now preparing to star in a remake of the film that should have starred Sarah Mondavan rather than Fabienne (who supposedly got the role by sleeping with the director).  Manon, who shares with Eve Harrington a smiley, ingratiating manner, is more than Fabienne’s youthful nemesis:  she is, in effect, Sarah’s revenge from beyond the grave.

    A school production of The Wizard of Oz, in which Lumir played the Cowardly Lion, crops up throughout the film.  Pierre came to see the show and liked his daughter’s performance.  Fabienne stayed away and this still rankles with Lumir.  Fabienne eventually admits she was in the audience but didn’t want Lumir to know that – not least because, as she now tells her, ‘you were lousy’.   By this stage, Kore-eda has given the theme of falsehood a thorough workout.  On Fabienne’s instructions, Lumir has even written her mother an apology to deliver to Luc in order to regain his services (Fabienne having no prior experience of apologising).  All this makes it very surprising that Lumir believes Fabienne came to the school show just because she now says she did.  (But, then, it’s pretty surprising she didn’t ask at a much earlier stage why Fabienne has called her pet dog Toto.)  Lumir seems finally to accept her mother as an incorrigibly outrageous old ‘character’.  Conciliation is in the air from the moment, graceful but contrived, that all the principals, as they leave a restaurant together, start to dance with each other in the street outside.  In Kore-eda films such as Still Walking (2008) and After the Storm (2016), characters achieve reconciliations that are hard-earned, qualified and persuasive.  The bland, mildly upbeat conclusion of The Truth is none of these things.

    Catherine Deneuve, whose strong presence dominates the film, plays Fabienne with assurance and candour.   Deneuve’s own vulnerability gives substance to Fabienne’s and makes the character (somewhat) less hard to take.  At seventy-six, Deneuve is older than Fabienne is prepared to admit to being; a few weeks after The Truth premiered at the Venice Film Festival, she suffered a (reportedly mild) stroke.  Fabienne finds it hard to remember whether certain acting contemporaries are alive or dead, which really must be an increasing problem for someone in her or Deneueve’s position.  The connections between them go beyond their shared longevity and stature.  Fabienne is Deneuve’s middle name; there’s a more disconcerting personal link too.  Françoise Dorléac, Deneuve’s elder sister (by a year), was also enjoying international success as a screen actress when she died in a car crash in 1967, aged twenty-five.  Whether or not there was sibling rivalry between the pair, it’s hard to think this tragedy in Deneuve’s life isn’t the source of the Sarah Mondavan strand in The Truth.  The remembered closeness between the child Lumir and Sarah in the film feels like a partly involuntary echo of the closeness of Deneuve and Dorléac.  At any rate, Kore-eda doesn’t otherwise explain how Lumir was in a position to grow to love her mother’s professional arch rival – why (it seems) Sarah spent plenty of time chez Fabienne.

    Although the character of Lumir doesn’t eventually convince, Juliette Binoche gives a highly skilled and likeable performance.  It’s Binoche’s emotional precision that serves to point up the inadequacy of her role.  She isn’t exactly self-effacing – and, wearing no make-up, is still beautiful – but she readily cedes the limelight to Deneuve.  Hank is despised as an actor by his wife as well as his mother-in-law.  (Fabienne’s remark about Jacques’s prowess in kitchen rather than bedroom is a response to Lumir’s estimation of her husband as a better lover than actor.)  He’s also a recovering alcoholic.  Ethan Hawke hasn’t much to do but he does it very well, whether Hank is looning about with his little daughter or being humorously self-demeaning at the dinner table – as if to vindicate other characters’ low opinion of him.  Everything about the acting in The Truth suggests that Kore-eda has adjusted easily to working with a cast whose native language isn’t his own.  (The dialogue is mostly in French with a few passages in English.)  He has always been a superb director of children and he gets a funny, naturally expressive performance from Clémentine Grenier.

    Charlotte sleeps in the attic room of the ‘castle’ – in what used to be Lumir’s bedroom.  Early on, Kore-eda has the DP Éric Gautier stress the room’s location in the geography of the house – the winding staircase that leads up to the attic, the window looking out on the grounds below.  Thanks to these shots, Juliette Binoche, who wears her hair longer than usual, almost brings Rapunzel to mind.  There are repeated references to Lumir’s favourite childhood story about a wicked witch (a French one, though she obviously evokes the Oz witch too).  But this fairytale aspect is finally half-hearted, an adjective that applies to the film as a whole.  Perhaps a distinctively Japanese gaze is detectable in the images of trees in Fabienne’s garden.  Otherwise, Kore-eda has absorbed his new film-making environment so well that he’s virtually disappeared into it.  The Truth is entertaining but so is his Japanese work – and that doesn’t trade in the contrivance and movie-fan sentimentality which are at the heart of The Truth.  I’m glad Kore-eda had the opportunity to make a film in Europe but I hope he doesn’t repeat the experiment any time soon.

    28 March 2020

  • Mr Jones

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Agnieszka Holland (2019)

    Europa, Europa (1991) and In Darkness (2011), the two best-known films of the Polish director Agnieszka Holland, are accounts of extraordinary resistance in a world controlled by Nazi Germany.  Mr Jones, Holland’s latest true story of an unequal struggle between an unlikely hero and brutal totalitarian authorities, takes place mainly in the Soviet Union, in 1933.

    After graduating from Cambridge in 1929, a young Welshman called Gareth Jones worked as Foreign Affairs Adviser (and de facto private secretary) to Lloyd George, before becoming a journalist.  Jones was in Germany in early 1933 and, a few days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, was one of the first foreign pressmen to interview him.  Soon afterwards, Jones obtained permission to enter the Soviet Union.  He went there keen to secure an interview with Josef Stalin too, and to learn the secret of the USSR’s apparent economic success under Stalin’s first five-year plan.  Jones uncovered instead the horrors of the Holodomor, the man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.  He managed to get back to Britain, where his reports on the famine appeared in several English and Welsh newspapers, including the Cardiff Western Mail.  Banned from re-entering the Soviet Union, Jones switched his attention to the Far East.  He spent several months in Japan and China before travelling to Mongolia.  In August 1935, The Times reported that the Chinese authorities had found Jones’s body in Manchuria.   He had been shot dead, seemingly on the eve of his thirtieth birthday.

    Agnieszka Holland’s track record may have convinced her that the material of Gareth Jones’s time in Russia and the Ukraine guaranteed a strong drama.  Mr Jones isn’t that, thanks principally to Andrea Chalupa’s shaky screenplay.  Wikipedia is only too right to term this a ‘biographical thriller’.  The characters often talk in the language of East-West espionage movies.  Holland’s direction veers between this popular terrain and some strenuously arty effects.  A prolonged shot of the protagonist (James Norton) eating a piece of bread – a fatally rare commodity in the Ukraine to which Jones has come – is slow cinema, to say the least[1].

    The film is predominantly in colour but there are stretches in black-and-white to reflect the grimmest realities of Jones’s journey (they may also be designed to connect with the photographs he took of the scenes he witnessed).  The cinematographer Thomas Naumiak creates some impressive monochrome compositions, especially of Jones as a small figure in a vast snowscape, but it’s hard to adopt this kind of visual scheme without its drawing attention to itself as a piece of technique – and Holland isn’t able to prevent that happening.  These severely aesthetic interludes sit awkwardly alongside Andrea Chalupa’s clumsy, clichéd dialogue.  A local peasant woman informs Jones that ‘millions have died’, as if the Holodomor is headline news in the Soviet papers.  When the story actually appears in the British press, a newsboy is heard calling, ‘Read all about it – Gareth Jones reports!’  Jones seems to have become an instant household name.

    Holland and Chalupa use as a narrative framing device sequences of George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) at his typewriter, writing Animal Farm.  The opening sentence of Orwell’s novella is, ‘Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes’.  In the scheme of Orwell’s political allegory, the farmer is generally supposed to be Tsar Nicholas II but there’s a theory that he was named for Gareth Jones.  The latter’s reports on the Ukraine famine were received sceptically by much of the British left-wing intelligentsia but Orwell was an exception; Animal Farm, first published in 1945, includes a chapter that clearly refers to the Ukraine famine of a decade before.  Mr Jones expands these details into the framing sequences and a scene late on where Jones and Orwell actually meet.  But this is too cursory to bring their imagined relationship to life.

    Except for her countryman Krzysztof Pieczyński (as the Bolshevik politician Maxim Litvinov), Holland has cast Anglophone actors in the main roles.  Vanessa Kirby seems a bit generic in her role as a femme fatale-ish but principled journalist working in Moscow but Peter Sarsgaard is ingeniously sinister as her illustrious, decidedly unprincipled boss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning newsman Walter Duranty.  Kenneth Cranham makes a brief, entertaining appearance as Lloyd George. It’s frustrating that Joseph Mawle, not seen enough lately, hasn’t more to do as Orwell.

    There’s been speculation that James Norton could be the next James Bond.  Without begrudging him a new level of fame and fortune, I hope the speculation’s wrong and that Norton can carry on with proper acting.   His wonderful portrait of Stephen Ward in The Trial of Christine Keeler was his best work yet.  Agnieszka Holland’s title character is a somewhat unworldly young man whose probing intelligence and tenacity propel him into an improbably perilous ordeal.  James Norton tries valiantly to individualise him – to convey just how remarkable his story was.  Gareth Jones was up against it, to put mildly, in expressing the truth of the Holodomor.  Norton is fighting the de-personalising script and confusing direction of Mr Jones every step of the way.

    21 March 2020

    [1] Afternote:  The film’s running time, according to the Curzon website and IMDb, is 141 minutes.   Even though it sometimes drags, I felt sure Mr Jones was over in less than that when I watched it on Curzon Home Cinema.  This seems to be right.  According to Philip Kemp’s Sight & Sound (March 2020) review, the running time has been trimmed to 118 minutes.

Posts navigation