Catherine Deneuve Is A Joy In Hirokazu Kore-eda's Playful English-Language Debut, And That's 'The Truth' [Venice Review]

“Life holds no more surprises for me,” sighs Amy, a character played by Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), in “Memories of my Mother” the film being shot within Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Venice opener “The Truth.” Perhaps Amy should go and watch “The Truth,” then, because it is, among many other things, a big surprise: a witty, meta dramedy about fiction and fact and self-mythologizing; a portrait of a wonderfully impossible woman; an admiring tribute to the craft of acting; a vehicle for a stellar late-career performance to cap one of France’s all-time great careers; and almost exactly the very last film you would have expected the beloved Japanese director to make, especially after his Palme d’Or-winning “Shoplifters.” The Venice Film Festival audience has a higher-than-average percentage of avid credits-watchers, but this time it felt a little like people were staying in their seats just to make sure the name that came up at the end was in fact his, and not, say, Olivier Assayas‘.

As Kore-eda’s English-language debut (though it is almost as much in French), this impressive feat of cultural ventriloquism is an oddly mixed blessing. It’s hard to know quite which metric to judge it by. Do we interpret it in the context of the French tradition of films about filmmaking, which includes Truffaut’sDay For Night” and Assayas’ “Clouds of Sils Maria” (and even current hit French TV show “Call My Agent!“)? In that light, “The Truth” is less scabrous and spiky, a smoother, kinder sort of meta, which does not make it less enjoyable, just a little less provocative. Or do we parse it in terms of Kore-eda’s own back catalogue, with which there are commonalities, but only if you look hard for them — harder, perhaps than the director’s widening fan base, expecting the immediate bittersweet endorphin hit from another slice of intimately observed familial humanism, might want? Probably, it’s wise just to sit back and, without preconceptions, let “The Truth” reveal itself to you.

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Deneuve’s Fabienne is, with irresistible real-world resonance, a hugely famous French film actress who, at 73, has just written a memoir. She has a prickly relationship with her screenwriter daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) who has flown in from New York to celebrate the book’s publication, with her husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) an American TV actor and recovering alcoholic, and her daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier). But then Fabienne, a fabulously, unapologetically haughty grande dame, has a prickly relationship with almost everyone: her husband Jacques (Christian Crahay) who is “a better cook than a lover”; her manager/assistant/factotum/butler Luc (Alain Libolt) who looks like John Gielgud “only less distinguished”; the rising young star of her current film, Manon (Manon Clavel) whose “calculated” behavior at a read-through elicits the most deliciously droll eye-roll; and almost every one of her movie-star contemporaries, whom Fabienne unfailingly presumes to be dead. Deneuve’s cattily dismissive reaction to a mention of Brigitte Bardot deserves a César all of its own.

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The trouble really starts when Lumir reads the memoir and discovers its very hazy, partial relationship to the truth. Or at least, to the truth as Lumir remembers it — everyone’s memories here are revealed to be unreliable, except perhaps Fabienne’s. She, by contrast, knowingly edits her past, the better to self-create as an icon, one who bluntly states that if her choice was between being “a bad mother and a great actress” or the other way around, she’s pretty sure she chose right. And surprisingly, she is not made monstrous for this choice. Where a more snide writer/director might judge Fabienne harshly for her semi-religious devotion to performance, and might seek to send up the ostensible vacuity and vanity of the profession, without being pompous (was ever there a less pompous filmmaker?), Kore-eda treats the craft of acting with deep respect, as a vocation — indeed, a life philosophy — fit for serious-minded people.

But that’s not to say the film is heavy. There’s the potential for melodrama, but despite the misleadingly grandiose title, “The Truth” is not in the business of the grand, tormented revelation. Instead, it’s an accretion of little moments, often very funny, sometimes a little sad, but always embedded in the reality of these sharply drawn, idiosyncratic characters, each of whom gets a least one scene that brings them out of Fabienne’s enormous shadow. That this happens organically, the way interactions naturally do, without chunks of exposition clogging up the conversations, is especially impressive given that overwriting is often the hurdle at which a non-native English speaker falls when working in English for the first time. Kore-eda, whose own “voice” here is as unobtrusive as ever, is confident enough writing in two foreign languages to leave eloquent gaps between the joined-dots of the characters’ backstories. This, along with the gently romanced but largely naturalistic cinematography from Eric Gautier, gives the film its airy, light-filled quality, despite the darkness and the pain of some of those histories.

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But it also makes “The Truth” a somewhat fleeting pleasure. The film is composed of episodes rather than mounting-stakes acts and exists more to illuminate the characters in a state of stasis than to watch them change dramatically. The randomly deployed musical cues — plaintive piano trills that evoke a sentimentality of which the film is otherwise notably free — are as close to the Kore-eda-“brand” heartstring-tug as the film gets, and without his trademark emotional wallop, the gentler pleasures of comedy and conviviality and Deneuve’s stratospheric charisma are the focus instead.

But even if the whole project were, as it feels, purely created to give Deneuve this role, it would be worth it. The rest of the note-perfect cast seem generously content to cede center stage, which is especially gracious of Binoche who herself is no slouch in the Great French Actress stakes (and who reportedly sowed the seed of the film with Kore-eda a long time ago). But Deneuve, like Fabienne, is the acknowledged, sparking center of this plasma globe, the planet around which all the others orbit. And it’s not simply stunt casting, there to reflect Deneuve’s real-world status back into a role without her moving a muscle. In every barbed exchanged, in every imperious gesture — and especially in those moments when the facade briefly cracks — Deneuve finds riveting notes of fragility beneath Fabienne’s fearsome, formidable self-control. So perhaps the answer to the quandary of where to place “The Truth” in the canon is simply this: It’s a Catherine Deneuve movie. In fact, it’s the late-career Catherine Deneuve movie she has always deserved, but that, for some strange reason, she had to wait for until now, until the Palme d’Or-winning director of bittersweet Japanese parent/child dramas finally wrote it for her. [B]

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