The Truth, Kore-eda’s fourteenth feature and his first made outside his native Japan, is the sentimental story of a very unsentimental woman, a grande dame of French cinema, Fabienne Dangeville, played by real-life grande dame Catherine Deneuve. On the occasion of the publication of her memoirs, entitled The Truth, Fabienne is visited by her estranged screenwriter daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), actor son-in-law Hank (Ethan Hawke), and granddaughter Charlotte (Clementine Grenier), who have flown in from New York. It does not take long for the cracks to appear: even as Lumir arrives at the family home, a lavish maison privée in central Paris, Fabienne tells a nervous interviewer to continue because it is only her daughter come to congratulate her. Nor does it take long for Lumir to discover that her mother’s memoirs do not reflect her experiences of childhood but are more about making Fabienne appear a better mother than she was. Fabienne is a battle-hardened, impenetrable, and yet nonetheless enchanting and compelling woman who is proud that she put her art before her family. When accused by Lumir of being a bad mother, Fabienne replies: ‘I’d prefer to be a bad mother, a bad friend, but a great actress.’ You get the distinct feeling she means it.

Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke in The Truth (photograph via Palace Films)

In this part film within a film, part chamber piece, the action is divided between the family home and the lot on which Fabienne’s latest movie is being shot. The Truth largely revolves around the relationship between Fabienne and Lumir, but it also deals with the relationships between minor players, largely filtered through the mother–daughter relationship. The film employs some obvious symbolism: the grounds of the beautiful family home in the 14ème conceal a prison behind them; in the sitting room, the granddaughter discovers a toy theatre in need of repair; and the film Fabienne is making (a B-grade sci-fi melodrama aptly called Memories of my Mother, set partially in outer space) sees her playing the daughter of a mother who does not age, a reference not only to the immortality of celluloid but also to the way the child still persists in the adult. The film is also set in autumn, which provides not only visually sumptuous shots of the sprawling garden and Parisian streets, but also serves to indicate the stage of life Fabienne is entering.

Yet Kore-eda’s film manages to escape heavy-handedness, primarily due to the complex layering of its symbolism and the strength of Deneuve’s performance. François Truffaut once said of Deneuve that she ‘adds ambiguity to any situation and any screenplay, for she seems to be concealing a great many secret thoughts, we sense there are things lurking behind the surface’. Even the most apparently sentimental moments are quickly undermined by Fabienne’s ambivalence. In a moving exchange in which mother and daughter at last come together in a tearful embrace, Fabienne shatters the moment by expressing regret over the waste of emotion that could have been better used in a particularly difficult scene she had shot the previous day. 

Catherine Deneuve in The Truth (photograph via Palace Films)

The Truth functions largely on a meta level: it is full of references to Deneuve and her career, signified visually through movie posters and costumes (such as her signature leopard-print coat) and intertextual references to her films, including Belle de Jour, 8 Women, Donkey Skin, The Last Metro, and actors and directors she has worked with. The central enigma of the film is the spectral figure of Sarah Mondavan, a contemporary and rival of Fabienne’s who died before making it big. Sarah is a multilayered presence: she is the ideal of motherhood for Lumir against which Fabienne is measured; a reference to Deneuve’s sister, actress Françoise Dorléac, who was killed in a car accident on the brink of stardom; and that part of herself Fabienne had to ‘kill off’ in order to become the woman she is.  

The Truth is an absorbing melodrama that plays in a very Shakespearean way with questions of performance and reality. The world of Kore-eda’s film is a stage upon which each character struts and frets. Deneuve’s Fabienne is a compelling character: hard and warm, yet funny and luminous, the shining centre of a dysfunctional family which nonetheless somehow thrives in its dysfunction. Binoche shows great emotional candour as Lumir, and Hawke is solid as the ‘second-rate’ American television actor who knows his place. With no resolution, and no reliable characters (even the granddaughter ends up deceiving Fabienne at the behest of Lumir), we are left with the idea that truth is in the eye of the beholder: we believe what we want to believe about ourselves and others. For Kore-eda, truth is the prison in which we are incarcerated; it is the enemy of poetry.

The Truth (Palace Films), 107 minutes, is directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda .