Mark Reviews Movies: THE TRUTH (2020)

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 2, 2020

Memories can be deceptive, especially if the person recalling them possesses the same quality. The Truth, writer/director Kore-eda Hirokazu's study of a most dysfunctional family, is about deception. Most of the lies are small—either intentionally or unintentionally misremembering certain details, claiming anecdotes that didn't happen, or not mentioning events that actually did occur. Small lies can keep us happy or help us avoid certain pains, but when they add up, as they do for one character in particular within this story, the deceptions only cause unhappiness and avoidable pain.

With this, Kore-eda, a seasoned expert in low-key dramas about families through his work in his homeland of Japan, makes his first movie not in his native language. Just as his previous films showed that the concerns of ordinary people have universal appeal, the director displays that his knowledge of how people think and behave likely has no national or language borders, either.

In its best moments, the movie cuts to heart of how a relationship between a mother, in this case a famous French actress, and a daughter, a screenwriter who lives with her husband and daughter in New York City, has been wrecked by lies. The irony, perhaps, is that another series of lies might be only way to repair it.

The focus is not so clear in the movie's other moments—and there are many of them, founded upon assorted other relationships between the actress and her family, her colleagues, and the people in her employ, as well as those people's relationships with each other. Kore-eda's screenplay is filled to the brim with characters who come and go throughout the story to re-establish what the central mother-daughter bond already illuminates quite clearly.

The actress is Fabienne Dangeville (Catherine Deneuve, playing a semi-version of herself, at least in terms of the actress' career), who is still renowned and respected within the industry, although the starring roles of her past aren't coming anymore. She's about to start production on a clever science-fiction movie (the story for which comes from a short story by Ken Liu).

It's about a woman who learns she is terminally ill and goes out to space, where she doesn't age, for seven-year stretches before brief return home. Every time she returns, the woman finds her husband and daughter getting older, until the husband dies and, eventually, the daughter, played at that point in the story by Fabienne, is in a nursing home.

The actress playing the un-aging mother is Manon Lenoir (Manon Clavel), whose career and on-screen presence has been compared to one of Fabienne's contemporaries. That actress, now dead for several decades, holds a special place in the heart of Fabienne's daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche). While Fabienne was busy with work and being otherwise absent from her daughter's life, Lumir saw her colleague as a mother figure—always present when needed, always willing to talk, always kind and considerate and loving in ways that Fabienne seemed unable to achieve.

This connection between the family friend and the movie's star is more pertinent now. Lumir has returned home, with her American TV actor husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) and daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier) accompanying her, to "celebrate" the publication of Fabienne's memoir. Upon reading it, Lumir is appalled at her mother's license to paint herself as an adoring mom and shocked that the actual mother-like presence in Lumir's life is all but absent.

Kore-eda certainly has established a promising corker of a familial drama, particularly in the constant back-and-forth of lies and uncertain memories for both Fabienne and Lumir. There's no denying that the performances from Deneuve, who plays Fabienne as a woman too absent-mindedly self-centered to think her deceptions might have a tinge of malice, and Binoche, who centers Lumir is the search for some kind of acknowledgment of failure from her mother, help tremendously. The ways in which the shooting and story of the sci-fi movie hold up a mirror to Fabienne's petty jealousy, the relationship between the actress and her daughter, and the history of that beloved/ignored family friend make for an especially intriguing through line, just off to the side of the central tale.

Ultimately, though, the subplot and what it could reflect about and for these characters feel like a clever but underutilized concept. Kore-eda, perhaps, spends too much time fleshing out characters and relationships that have nowhere to go, since the story must always return to Fabienne and Lumir.

Hank, for example, is a recovering alcoholic who is captivated by his mother-in-law, even as she insults in English and French terms that he doesn't understand. There's a funny running joke about Charlotte's belief that her grandmother is a witch, who transformed her grandfather into a tortoise wandering the property (When granddad, played by Roger Van Hool, does show up, it actually and amusingly doesn't clarify the matter). Fabienne's long-time personal assistant (played by Alain Libolt) quits after he isn't mentioned in the memoir, which is mostly excuse to put Lumir in that role but, in how Fabienne admits to not knowing anything about her assistant's personal life, also reinforces a point about the character that is cemented over and over again.

The movie's central relationship does come through clearly, even if the specific details remain intentionally uncertain. That's the point of The Truth, which might have resonated more with less attention to assorted distractions and repetitions.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products