This is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film outside of his native Japan after his award-winning ‘Shoplifters.’
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film, The Truth (La vérité) is now available on streaming platforms, and on MUBI in the U. K. This is Kore-eda’s first film shot in France, after his Palme d’Or award-winning Shoplifters. The Truth continues the filmmaker’s interest in family dynamics. However, this isn’t any ordinary family, with Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche playing mother and daughter.
The family depicted in The Truth is a particular one, headed by an icon of French cinema who lives in a big house, deemed to look like “a castle,” with a beautiful garden inhabited by a tortoise in the middle of Paris. Kore-eda’s film is no Parisian fairytale, but a film that explores mother/daughter relationships through the prism of film acting.
Catherine Deneuve plays Fabienne Dangeville, a glamourous French film star who is capricious and a little bit of a diva. She receives the visit of her daughter, Lumir, played by Juliette Binoche, with her husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) and their young daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier). They’ve come from New York to celebrate the publication of Fabienne’s new autobiography. Lumir, however, is quick to read through and point out to her mother that her memoir isn’t completely truthful, while ironically being titled “La vérité” (the truth). Fabienne’s response, full of wit, is that she is an actress and thus, of course, she would never tell the “naked truth.
