“The Truth” (PG) *** and a half

JAPANESE writer/director Hirokazo Koreeda travelled to France to direct Catherine Deneuve and Juliet Binoche as mother and daughter in a story that hovers about the fringes of the filmmaking industry, acting as a line of work and family relationships.

Deneuve plays Fabienne, a star whose acting career has faded more than a bit in old age. Binoche plays her screenwriting daughter Lumir, who has been working on the US long enough to have made an amicable marriage with Hank (Ethan Hawke) whose career was acting in TV series. Their bi-lingual daughter Charlotte (Clementine Grenier) is an engaging moppet who tells it as she sees it.

Fabienne’s autobiography is about be published. Reading it, Lumir is aghast at her mother’s disregard for anything casting herself in an unfavourable light.  Watching that, you might be forgiven for perceiving a resemblance between her and Norma Desmond  (“Sunset Boulevard”, 1950).

Fabienne has many male friends, former husbands, film-industry figures and servants, whose presences through Koreeda’s first non-Japanese film are sometimes a little confusing to untangle. But that’s far less important to the film than the ongoing interaction between mother and daughter. 

“The Truth”, as you might imagine, is about the untruths that pervade the whole of Fabienne’s existence. She’s been given a role in a sci-fi movie. The character representing her mother has spent many earth-years living in space recovering from an ailment. 

So when her mother gets back to earth looking no older than when she left it, the film within the film has Fabienne playing a daughter who looks more than twice her mother’s age! It’s easy to imagine how well that might go down with a faded star. 

“The Truth” makes no significant observations about honesty. Rather, it uses the abuse of veracity as a keystone supporting a film that premiered by opening the Venice Film Festival in August. 

At Palace Electric