The mother-daughter confrontation, bristling with misunderstandings and old grudges, is a wonderful antidote to the ambient gloom: under the guise of a family reunion, The Truth (2019), by Hirokazu Kore-eda, turns out to be a delightful trompe-l’il eye, a mise en abyme of cinema and the lives of the actors.
Catherine Deneuve plays a huge actress in the twilight of her career, Fabienne, who receives a visit from her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), herself a screenwriter and married to a second-rate actor, Hank (Ethan Hawke). While his mother has just published her Memoirs, Lumir intends to pinpoint some untruths in the work. And settle scores with this mother who was so often absent during her childhood – and who has flashes of honesty: she would much rather have succeeded in her career than in her family life. Lumir wears a detached and conquering smile, careful not to show her moods. In return, his mother has the sarcastic air of one who expects nothing, and is not fooled.
Cruel and funny, the film avoids the trap of the nostalgic portrait of the aging actress. With diabolical accuracy, a tigress in a fur coat, Catherine Deneuve gives a lot of her experience to this charismatic character, assuming a certain self-deprecation from the first minutes of the film; in the interview she gives to a journalist (Laurent Capelluto), Fabienne unabashedly affirms her status as a cinema icon.
More facetious
The feature film owes a lot to the commitment of its actors: in addition to the Deneuve-Binoche tandem, let us cite Ethan Hawke, with his amused and distanced look of son-in-law and husband, as well as the young Clémentine Grenier, in the role of Charlotte, the lively and mischievous granddaughter discovering a wonderful storyteller in her grandmother. Another key character, Manon Clavel plays a rising star of French cinema, Manon, opposite Fabienne in a science fiction film. These secondary characters shed a different light on the psychology of the “matriarch”.
From his first fiction feature film, Maborosi (1995), to A Family Affair, Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, Hirokazu Kore-eda, trained in documentary, probes Japanese society into its folds and his unsaid things. The humor is often discreet, while, film after film, the little dishes simmer, like the feelings.
In La Vérité, more facetious, the director explores the “cinema family” and makes a shift: he chooses comedy and shoots for the first time in French, a language that is foreign to him. The result is explosive, with a scenario that unravels like an artichoke, where lies and bad faith become the driving force behind unexpected reunions, once we reach the “heart”, without a bit of sentimentality.