68 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
Juliette Binoche and Catherine Deneuve star in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
BINDINGS
“ The Truth” and “The Booksellers.”BY ANTHONY LANE
ILLUSTRATION BY SONIA PULIDO
T
he trees are in their autumn beauty,
at the start of “The Truth,” and
so is Catherine Deneuve. She plays a
famous French actress named Fabi-
enne—snippy, chic, and radiating effort-
less hauteur. Her dedication to her art
is unyielding. “I prefer to have been a
bad mother, a bad friend, and a good
actress,” she says. “You may not forgive
me, but the public does.” Ever serene,
she doesn’t deny the collateral damage
that her career may have caused. She
just doesn’t care.
Any resemblance to living persons
is, of course, entirely coincidental. None-
theless, the role of Fabienne is a comi-
cally good fit for Deneuve, since it allows
her both to fulfill and, ever so lightly, to
kid the dominant status that she enjoys
in her native land, and in the saga of cin-
ema. You don’t work, as she has done, for
Truffaut, Buñuel, Jacques Demy, Leos
Carax, and François Ozon—and, let
us not forget, alongside Burt Reynolds
in Robert Aldrich’s “Hustle” (1975)—
without acquiring the crown and scep-
ter, as it were, of a grande dame. Re-
member Arnaud Desplechin’s “Kings
and Queen” (2004), in which Deneuve
plays a psychiatrist. “Do you know you’re
very beautiful?” a patient asks her. “Yes,
I’ve been told, thank you,” she replies.
At the helm of “The Truth” is the Jap-
anese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, and
it marks his first foray into French ter-
rain. The setting is a semi-pastoral patch
of Paris, where Fabienne resides in astately mansion; we see her stroll through
its garden in silvery pajamas, rehearsing
her lines. Also taking the air is a pet tor-
toise, who shares a name with Fabienne’s
ex-husband. (So much for that marriage.)
Maintaining the animal motif, she wears
a leopard-print coat to walk her dog be-
side the walls of a nearby prison—a de-
liberate touch of incongruity, halfway to
a dream. Sometimes it takes an outsid-
er’s eye to spot such juxtapositions.
Fabienne is concluding an interview,
at home, when guests arrive, fresh off
the plane from New York. “It’s nothing.
My daughter and her little family,” she
explains. That “nothing” freezes the
blood. Her daughter is Lumir ( Juliette
Binoche), a screenwriter, married to a
not very successful American actor, Hank(Ethan Hawke), and they’ve come with
their young daughter, Charlotte (Clé-
mentine Grenier), who inquires of her
grandmother, “Do you really have mag-
ical powers?” I wouldn’t bet against it.
One reason for the visit is the imminent
publication of Fabienne’s memoirs, which
bear the very unwise title of “The Truth,”
and which, as far as Lumir is concerned,
are a pack of shiny lies. One example:
her mother claims that she used to pick
Lumir up from school. Yeah, right.
You can sense, soon enough, how “The
Truth” is likely to proceed. Though trou-
ble may be brewing between Fabienne
and Lumir, on the other side of it lies
calm. Mother-daughter movies consti-
tute a mini-genre, headed by “Mildred
Pierce” (1945), but the melodramatic drive
of that film, skirting hysteria, is at a far
remove from Kore-eda’s approach. El-
liptical to a fault, he is concerned with
fears and suspicions that are muted or
sidelined, often over many years, rather
than being poured forth. Think of the
two sets of parents in “Like Father, Like
Son” (2013), who discover that their re-
spective sons were accidentally switched
at birth. Nothing so drastic occurs in the
latest film, yet old wounds wait to be re-
opened, as when Fabienne admits to
Lumir that, contrary to earlier reports,
she did once go to see her daughter act,
onstage, in “The Wizard of Oz.” “You
were lousy,” she adds. Every parent knows
the value of a white lie, sweetly timed,
but not Fabienne. She tells the truth as
if unsheathing a knife.
Why, then, does this supple story
begin to falter? Maybe because it comes
across, by Kore-eda’s standard, as some-
thing of a package, with its arguments
neatly folded and wrapped. Fabienne,
for instance, just happens to be shoot-
ing a sci-fi movie, which is all about a
mother who doesn’t age and a daughter
who does—“You stay young and I keep
getting older,” the daughter declares. The
scene that follows is touchingly done,
yet we know that its main purpose is to
bolster the theme of generational anxi-
ety. I can’t help wishing that Fabienne
were starring in a glossy thriller, or a
wisp of a comedy, that bore no relation
whatever to problems at home.
Then, there is a weird request of Fa-
bienne’s. She proposes that Lumir, being
a writer, should help her by composing
lines of dialogue, to be used in a speech