Tuesday 14 July 2020

The Truth (2020) - Movie Review



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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