12/05/20

Curzon Home Cinema

Hirokazu Koreeda’s first film outside his native Japan is an elegant French affair, a story about the tensions between mothers and daughters, fiction and truth, acting and living. Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) is a celebrated actress, whose memoir – entitled La Vérité – has just been published. There’s an initial print run of a hundred thousand, she boasts to her daughter, Lumir (Juliette Binoche). ‘Fifty thousand,’ her assistant corrects her, and Lumir rolls her eyes. Such self-aggrandising exaggeration is clearly typical of her mother, and establishes Fabienne’s complicated relationship with ‘truth.’

Lumir lives in New York, where she is a screen-writer. She has a husband, Hank (Ethan Hawke), a TV actor, newly sober after a stint in rehab, and a young daughter, Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier); this is their first visit to Paris for many years. Clearly Lumir and Fabienne have issues to work through.

The storytelling is as elegant as Fabienne’s home furnishings. She has all the trappings of success, including a house that ‘looks like a castle.’ She’s imperious and vain, but complex too: this is no pantomime villain. Just a woman, caught in the gap between the fantasies she performs and the emotional realities she avoids.

The film-within-a-film device is neatly employed, the parallels between Fabienne’s current project, Memories of My Mother (based on a short story by Ken Liu), and the dynamics of her real-life family are subtly – but clearly – defined. In the story, a mother is frozen in time; her daughter ages while she stays the same. Fabienne plays the daughters’s oldest incarnation. But Fabienne and Lumir are frozen too; they’ve never moved past the resentments forged in Lumir’s youth, never resolved their feelings around a cataclysmic event, the death of ‘Sarah,’ Fabienne’s friend (and rival), and Lumir’s confidante. But, as Lumir confronts Fabienne about the distortions in her memoir, we see the glimmerings of a thaw…

Deneuve completely dominates this film, and that’s as it should be: it’s clearly her story. Fabienne is a huge character; everyone is diminished in her presence. Binoche and Hawke make excellent foils, their exasperation and admiration beautifully conveyed.

Koreeda is clearly one to watch; this is an utterly compelling piece of cinema, where not much happens but everything matters.

4 stars

Susan Singfield