76 ILLUSTRATION BY MANSHEN LOOMNIVOREHirokazu Kore-eda’s new film, The Truth,
ends as many of his films do, with a group
of people walking. Some of them are
related; some are not. Some know exactly
where they’re going and why; others are
just tagging along, enjoying the exercise
and the company. The person who seems
most determined, surest of what she’s
doing, is a septuagenarian movie star
named Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), in
whose wake the others appear to follow.
She’s on her way to a film studio to reshoot
an emotional scene that she feels she didn’t
get right the day before—though every-
one else thought it marvelous—because
her real life has intervened. The previ-
ous night, at the end of a long, cathartic
heart-to-heart with her daughter, Lumir
(Juliette Binoche), Fabienne suddenly sat
up straight and blurted out, “Why didn’t
I play it like this? Why didn’t I think of
it!” And in that moment, this great French
actor expresses the essential subject of this
great Japanese director’s art: people won-
dering how to play their lives, and why
they can’t seem to get it right the first time.
Kore-eda has been writing and direct-
ing gorgeous, slyly challenging dramatic
features in his native Japan since the
1990s, winning awards at festivals all
over the world without gaining much of
a following among U.S. moviegoers. His
profile has risen lately, since his 13th dra-
matic feature, Shoplifters, won the Palme
d’Or at the 2018 Cannes festival and was
nominated last year for an Oscar for Best
Foreign Language Film. That wrenching
movie, about a makeshift family living on
the margins of society, didn’t play in a lot
of the big American multiplexes—these
days, almost no foreign films do.
But those who managed to see it in a
theater or found it on Amazon or Hulu
were moved by its vibrant lower-depthsThe Reigning Master
of Family Drama
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film, his first set outside of Japan,
showcases the great director’s signature theme.By Terrence Rafferty