The Truth

When a bad moth­er approach­es old age and enters the phase of life where one spends more time cat­a­logu­ing mem­o­ries than cre­at­ing new ones, she is faced with a choice. She can reck­on with the lega­cy of neg­li­gence she’s left behind, that of infi­deli­ty and absen­tee par­ent­ing and recre­ation­al cru­el­ty in the guise of tough love.

Or she can do what Cather­ine Deneuve’s declin­ing screen queen Fabi­enne does in the lat­est from Hirokazu Koree­da (the director’s first out­side of his native Japan), and retreat into self-spun fic­tions, revis­ing her his­to­ry into a more flat­ter­ing ver­sion of itself.

Fabi­enne is a dyed-in-the-wool actress set in a cheek­i­ly Deneu­vian mould. She approach­es pen­ning her mem­oirs as if she’s cre­at­ing the role of a life­time. The pas­sages recall­ing after­noons spent pick­ing up her smil­ing daugh­ter from school stick in the craw of the now-adult Lumir (Juli­ette Binoche), who remem­bers things going down a bit differently.

The film begins as she and her fam­i­ly (charis­mat­ic alco­holic hus­band Ethan Hawke and mop­pet daugh­ter Clémentine Gre­nier) join Fabi­enne at her home in the shad­ow of a loom­ing, blunt­ly sym­bol­ic prison com­plex to com­mem­o­rate the release of this book. Yet she brings with her an in-depth line edit, com­plete with Post-It notes mark­ing the most objec­tion­able selec­tions. The time has come to shake the branch­es of the fam­i­ly tree.

Koree­da gives this process a sym­bol­ic coun­ter­point in Fabienne’s sup­posed come­back, on a sci-fi dra­ma that casts her as daugh­ter to a hot young It girl (Manon Clav­el) ren­dered age­less by out­er space.

Fabi­enne and Lumir sort through resent­ments and regrets in dis­cur­sive con­ver­sa­tions with a pal­pa­ble sense of French­ness uncom­mon for a vis­it­ing film­mak­er. They snipe and micro-aggress like spar­ring part­ners with an inti­mate knowl­edge of one another’s weak points, an inap­pro­pri­ate­ly fluffy score pass­ing off this mature bat­tle of wills as one of those talky Gal­lic drame­dies. Sub­plots involv­ing the pre­co­cious-yet-not-too-pre­co­cious young­ster and Fabienne’s ex-hus­band (Roger Van Hool) ulti­mate­ly weigh the film down by mak­ing it lighter.

Koreeda’s tech­nique, honed and per­fect­ed over the past few years with After the Storm and the Cannes-win­ning Shoplifters, involves suck­er-punch­ing view­ers in the final half-an-hour with emo­tion­al stakes ratch­eted up to a new­ly intense reg­is­ter. He does the same here, as Fabi­enne grap­ples with the harsh light of self-aware­ness. Watch­ing her obsti­nate haugh­ti­ness crum­ble in the face of the time she has left on Earth bor­ders on the dev­as­tat­ing, espe­cial­ly to those famil­iar with Deneuve’s career trajectory.

For­eign auteurs often go astray as they make their way to the West, and it’s a relief that Koreeda’s approach to del­i­cate fam­i­ly dynam­ics tran­scends the lan­guage bar­ri­er. The build­ing blocks of his oeu­vre – com­pas­sion, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, con­nec­tion once hard­ened guards have been let down – have been smart­ly fit­ted to suit the sui gener­is tal­ents of the film’s head­lin­ing leg­ends, play­ing up their spiki­er wits.

But even those defences fall and give way to the heart-pierc­ing truth at the cen­tre of both Koreeda’s fil­mog­ra­phy and the bond between two war­ring, lov­ing women: the peo­ple clos­est to us are worth the pain they cause.

The Truth is avail­able to stream exclu­sive­ly on Cur­zon Home Cin­e­ma from 20 March.