Following his Palme d’Or winning Shoplifters, easily one of 2018’s finest films, Hirokazu Kore-eda could have written his own ticket to making just about any film he wanted. So it’s telling that the Japanese master of familial drama immediately decided to go abroad for his next picture. Asian filmmakers often make the jump to western filmmaking as a way to better break through into the English marketplace, to varied success. Some of those most recent imports have particularly come from South Korea in Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. But it’s less common to see an Asian filmmaker instead turn their attention to pursuits that are European-based. Kore-eda’s latest feels like it takes a page out of the book of Iranian auteurs like Abbas Kiarostami or Asghar Farhadi, who focused their work outside of their native countries towards French and Spanish-based stories, respectively.
There’s likely many reasons why Kore-eda would go this route, but once the film begins to take shape in front of you, it’s clear that the primary motivator is the muse at the center of the entire affair: Catherine Deneuve.
Kore-eda, of course, would not be the first filmmaker to make such a claim, given Deneuve’s early historic career working for a murderer’s row of cinephile favorites likes Bunuel, Polanski and Truffaut. All it takes is one quick search through the Criterion Collection and you’re bound to quickly land on something revolutionary that she starred in, and that was just within the first 10 or so years of her career. With The Truth, Kore-eda basically formulates a tribute to the now 76 year old master thespian, casting her in a central role that somewhat mirrors her own career trajectory as a once ingenue that is now inhabiting grand dame roles. But he doesn’t just stop there: he also brings one of the great leading lights of current French cinema in Juliette Binoche (speaking of Kiarostami) to play her disaffected screenwriting daughter, who has a particularly strained relationship with her mother’s career minded ways, something that critically harmed her own acting pursuits and passions as a young girl. And to tie it all off, the director brings in Ethan Hawke as the daughter’s struggling actor husband, probably because he liked the Before trilogy a lot. I mean, who doesn’t?
The Truth is a fascinating attempt for Kore-eda to take many of his usual themes of familial struggles and place them within a very different context outside of his typical cultural milieu, while at the same time, apply it towards this bit of loose auto-fiction that he has clearly concocted alongside his star. To say it’s a minor effort within his canon is no grave insult, given the typically high bar that he works within, but much of The Truth is comfortably lodged more within the realm of a pleasant diversion. There’s a raised voice here or there, and one person stomps out of the house and the lead’s life temporarily (but in a very calm and collected way, and only to return by film’s end), yet for the most part, Kore-eda is aiming for something more congenial, with no real interest in the tensions that can often run roughshod over material of this nature.
Perhaps where The Truth finds its most lively moments are in its “film within a film” sequences that find Deneuve’s Fabienne playing a small part in a sci-fi film opposite the current generation’s new up and coming star, Manon (Manon Clavel). The premise: Manon’s character is a mother who is dying and must live in outer space to lengthen her lifespan, and every time she returns to planetside, her daughter has aged decades. Fabienne plays that daughter at her eldest stages, and there’s a fascinating reflexive nature on the themes between these shared stories and how Fabienne’s own maternal instincts surface more when she’s in front of the camera than not. While much of The Truth is satisfied to play at its own medium tempo, watching Fabienne slowly reform as a performer (and perhaps as a person), is where some of the film’s heftiest material is laid bare.
Of course, everyone involved is in top form, and watching Fabienne tearing Hawke’s kind but somewhat aloof husband with the sharpest of barbs over a glass of red is never not going to be entertaining. We all know what a legend Deneuve is, but to be reminded so forcefully is welcome enough reason for The Truth to exist.