Fabienne Dangeville (Catherine Deneuve) is the worst kind of
prima donna. Endlessly vain and egotistical, she makes for one of the rare
cinematic instances of the separation of art and artist from the perspective of
the artist. She has a strained relationship with her daughter, writer Lumir
(Juliette Binoche), but rather than being at all concerned with that strain,
she just focuses even more on her acting craft. So long as the audience
forgives her transgressions, that’s all that matters.
Portrayals of this kind of famous actor are relatively
common in the world of film, but this one taps into something quite visceral
within that same vein, and it’s around Deneuve’s immaculate performance that
the rest of the production revolves. The vanity, the glibness, the insistence
that she be heralded above all others for her talents; it reverberates aspects
of Assayas’ Clouds Of Sils Maria in how it shows an older actress struggling
with the facticity of her own aging. But in Fabienne, it’s not just wanting to
relive the good old days; it’s wanting to relive how she remembers the
good old days.
The unreliability of memory is a major theme throughout,
starting with the inaccuracies in Fabienne’s memoir and continuing into her
rationale for forgetting her lines while shooting a movie (which, in another
likely accidental connection to Sils Maria, is a sci-fi flick that serves as
fuel for the conversation within the dialogue regarding maturity and
maternity). It’s an attempt to keep reality and fiction separate, which itself
requires an intentional obfuscation of just how much the two affect each other,
in the process of creating fiction especially.
But its themes reach a special place of poignancy once the
more international trappings of the production become apparent. This is
writer/director/editor Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film not to be set in Japan,
or to be spoken in Japanese, that features a lot of bilingual dialogue, and
even features Ethan Hawke in a main supporting role to be as unabashedly
charming as always. Through him, as Lumir’s husband and TV actor Hank, the film
also delves into how the emotions created by both fact and fiction, whether
it’s an actual strain between mother and daughter or one that’s acted out, is
capable of transcending the language barrier because those emotions are so
universal. No wonder Hirokazu’s first step into newer territory worked out so
damn well; part of the narrative is an example of it in action.
This is quite the contemplative feature, and as Fabienne’s
thickened walls of cynicism and egotism erode away over time, it makes for a
very moving effort as much about the acting craft as it is about how vital, and
yet haphazard, human memory can be.
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