Perspective is a tricky thing, from one vantage point, an image or a memory is recalled to be one way while another person looking at the same image or looking back at the same moment, will have an entirely different outlook. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than when people with close but fractured relationships look back on the emotional events that made their relationship so and often had a profound effect on whom they became. The latest film from acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda attempts to explore how the truth and the interpretation of it weighs on a world famous actress and her adult daughter.
The Truth (La vérité) features Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), an aging French movie legend who has just completed her memoirs. Upon publication, her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), a screenwriter living in New York, returns to Paris with her TV actor husband (Ethan Hawke) and their young daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier) to commemorate its release. As Lumir takes issue with Fabienne’s rose-colored version of the past, mother and daughter must work through their prior issues. Reflected cleverly by Fabienne’s latest role in a sci-fi drama, their strained relationship takes a poignant journey toward possible reconciliation.
The strength of The Truth is in the performances of its two heavyweight actresses in Catherine Denueve and Juliette Binoche. The two legendary French thespians put their skills on full display as a mother-daughter combination with barely concealed issues from years of contentious dealings and repressed emotions. While mostly a dramatic study of two characters and their relationship, The Truth is also at times a comedy and Denueve and Binoche display their ability to depict both wit and emotional heft with a chemistry that allows both to disappear into their characters, coming across completely believable as a mother and daughter with years of enmity to work through.
The Truth attempts to explore the very nature of the concept, and the effect and appropriateness of comforting white lies. In her memoirs, Fabienne paints herself the doting working mother; still making time to pick up her daughter from school. Lumir on the other hand remembers her childhood differently, with Fabienne always more concerned with work. Fabienne cops to bending reality, commenting that the naked truth is not that interesting. But Fabienne’s casual relationship with the truth is not just a point of contention and pain for Lumir, it has looms over her own contentment with her legendary status as an actress in the form of her rivalry with another screen legend named Sarah Mondavan, now deceased (and who never appears in the film) and who played a maternal figure for Lumir in place of her mother. Fabienne’s betrayal of Sarah and the role it played in her own ascension, despite Sarah’s arguable greater talent level, weighs on Fabienne’s internal esteem in addition to her relationship with Lumir. During a pivotal moment at the film’s climax, even when the mother and daughter share a genuine moment, we’re left wonder how much of it was real, and how much of it was a fabrication? Lumir appears miffed herself, but in the end seems to accept where she and her mother’s relationship has finally landed and in her acceptance, perhaps we find the film’s point. The truth can be a tenuous thing, but if our interpretation of it leads to a satisfactory place, does it matter just how we ended up there?
The Truth is director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first foray outside of Japan and perhaps this fact explains the film’s overall failure to connect. It is a quiet, behavioral character study as much of his work has come to be known, but it fails to fully pull you into its world as that work has. Despite the shortcomings of the story and film’s structure, Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche treat us to two strong performances that display just why they’re so highly regarded as actresses. Still, The Truth as an end product does not live up to the heavyweight names involved.
Image: IFC Films
