Review: The Truth Is a Wry and Wise Look at a Mother-Daughter Relationship

The opening images of The Truth immediately announce a different kind of Kore-eda Hirokazu film. Shots of a tranquil French countryside, with its lush trees seemingly touching the clouds, are worlds away from Kore-eda’s cramped, geometric renderings of poor families living on top of one another. Given France’s current political and economic upheaval, especially in small towns, The Truth’s opening shots suggest a fading away of life, a rued past-ness. In this manner, these compositions recall Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, which was driven by the terror of how shifting mores might affect privileged life, the old guard of rarefied culture. This theme only tangentially, perhaps coincidentally, concerns Kore-eda, who has much more of a feeling for the poor than he has for the elite. Yet Kore-eda is still a master stylist, and these images have a spectral beauty. The tactility of earlier Kore-eda imagery has been traded for a softer, more luscious, nevertheless melancholic dream world.

The fraught quality of current French life, of the ongoing divide between rich and poor that increasingly hounds modern existence around the world, is encapsulated in The Truth by a macabre and amusing detail: the mansion that serves as the film’s predominant setting, and which is said to stand in front of an unseen prison. Such a detail also, more pressingly, suggests that legendary film actress Fabienne Dangeville (Catherine Deneuve) is past her prime, being pushed out and aside by an encroaching, less hopeful new world. Like anyone who’s enjoyed vast success in a brutal profession, Fabienne has left figurative bodies in her wake, especially her daughter, Lumir (Juliette Binoche), who, of course, resents Fabienne’s self-absorption. For a few days, Lumir comes to visit Fabienne with her American husband, Hank (Ethan Hawke), and their daughter, Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier), in the wake of the publication of Fabienne’s fabricated new memoir, and past grievances are once again aired.

At its heart, The Truth is a familiar mother-daughter weepie, but Kore-eda doesn’t emphasize the usual textures. Fabienne and Lumir don’t exchange tarty, only-in-the-movies dialogue, and there’s few overt emotional catharses; instead, they pick at each other subtly and obsessively, like family members do in real life, until the picking occasionally boils over into hostility. In extraordinary performances, Deneuve and Binoche communicate the love that Fabienne and Lumir have for another, which is never more obvious than when the mother and daughter are deriding one another’s careers, past neglects, or choice in men. As the cliché goes, there’s a thin line between love and hate, and on that line is another emotion: terror of the loss of said love, which Deneuve and Binoche express on a subliminal level.

If Kore-eda and his actors had only dramatized this much of an emotional spectrum, The Truth might have still been maudlin. But he also taps Deneuve and Binoche’s ferocious creative energy, which is especially evident when Fabienne and Lumir talk of how the former almost worked with Alfred Hitchcock. Upon hearing this, Binoche has Lumir do a dramatic stabbing gesture, a parody of Psycho that simultaneously allows Lumir’s frustration with Fabienne to boil over into physical drama. In this moment, we understand Lumir is also an actress, a gifted one, though her issues with her mother have kept her on the sidelines writing screenplays.

There’s a juicy meta concept at the center of The Truth that Kore-eda doesn’t quite bring to fruition. Fabienne is working on a sci-fi film in which she plays the daughter of a mother who never ages, opposite a young actress (Manon Clavel), who’s said to resemble a formal rival of Fabienne’s. A few of the film-within-a-film moments are heartbreaking, especially when Fabienne is given the opportunity to symbolically play herself and Lumir at once, but this subplot hasn’t been woven throughout The Truth. And Fabienne’s memoir, which the woman amusingly brushes off as myth-making, is another concept that’s left hanging. Assayas, more of a gamesman than Kore-eda, might have made a meal of these parallel fictions and realities, allowing them to hopscotch off one another to create a hall-of-mirrors-like family tapestry.

Yet The Truth holds the viewer with its deceptive casualness, with its lustrousness, with its command of seemingly incidental emotional fireworks. Near the end of the film, Fabienne and Lumir may finally reach the “truth” of their relationship, in which Fabienne confesses to feeling rejected with a straightforwardness that affirms both her vulnerability as well as her steely need to guard it. The scene, as Fabienne and Lumir melt into each other, has an unforgettable, hard-earned tenderness, but it’s not without a pitiless punchline. After opening up to her daughter, Fabienne, ever the supreme show-woman, realizes that this is the performance that she should’ve given in her new project. By the end of The Truth, the film’s title has become a wry and wise joke, as truth is, for many of us, a matter of aesthetics.