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