Call a movie The truth and not die of shame is only available to a few. And one of them, besides Plato, is the Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda . Actually, the filmography of the filmmaker winner of the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2017 with A family affair is a succession of titles between more or less vague poetry (After the storm, Walking or After life ) to topics between manidos and something obvious ( Of such father, such son or Nobody knows ). That, in addition to the simple description of what there is no possibility of replication ( Our little sister or The third murder ). Perhaps the choice of language forces the extra effort of abstraction. French is what he has. Indeed, La verité , which is what the film is really called, is the first production with non-Japanese actors of a director who began making documentaries in the early 90s ; the first work committed to the most transparent of universals, let's say so, of a creator always obsessed with every detail of a reality as immediate as it is ardent; nominalist rather than metaphysical.
«It is not true», the director defended himself in the last festival of Venice, «that the plot of the film has been the one that has decided that the production be in French. Everything is simpler. More than language or anything else, everything had to do with the leading actresses and their international projection. That is, the film is French for the simple reason that France has Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche! It was not so much, therefore, a conceptual issue as, again and as always in his cinema, only carnal.
The truth, to situate us, tells the visit of a daughter (Binoche) to a mother (Deneuve). The second is a great movie diva that has just published his memoirs (all lies) and the first is, things of fame and mythology, simply the daughter of the diva. In addition, she is a writer and, therefore, and as her father, also a liar in her own way. While the meeting is taking place, which is also a disagreement, the autumnal interpreter works on a science fiction film that reflects among other things about the time that passes. And it pierces us. What follows is not just a movie with a movie inside, not a life with as many thousand lives inside it, not even a filial love pregnant with every conceivable reconciliation and resentment. It is all that and something else, as indefinable as physical, that has to do with the beauty of a magnificent lie (the cinema) that can only be true.
«It is hard for me to reflect on the meaning and motivation of my cinema. I have to let a whole decade go by to realize why I did what I did. Now I think of my films of 10 years ago and there I see reflected the death of my mother and the birth of my daughter. But you are never fully aware, ”he reflects little by little that something more than what his cinema already shows shows. And it continues: «Anyway, nobody is never so original. Shortly after a little diving into feelings, it is easy to see that all cultural or national conditions disappear. Under all the lies that make up the particular lives, is ... ». And in the ellipsis leaves the perfect solution of the puzzle.
In fact, despite the imperial Deneuve taking the witness of the forceful Kirin Kiki (recently deceased and habitual in Japanese cinema), despite the novel complexity of each sequence, against all, Kore-eda remains intact. Again, the family; again, the pain of loss, and as always, the clarity to build complicity with both the world of childhood and that of old age. And in the middle, as never before, the specular maze of representation. The director's strategy is to let the viewer vibrate, or simply get lost, behind each of the uncertainties and regrets that his new French family inhabits. The armchair is invited to be confused in a scenario that is both fabulation and reality itself. We look at the character of Deneuve and it is impossible not to imagine Deneuve herself. Not in vain, the house he inhabits is populated with memories of his films, the ones we've all seen, those of Deneuve herself. And the same for Binoche. And the same for Ethan Hawke that, not in vain, gives life to an actor who fights against the failure of his condition. The film is about interpreters and how their work leaks with life. And backwards. Everything is a lie because, as in baroque dramas, the truth cannot reside anywhere other than the illusion itself, the myth, the art ... the cinema. Be French, be I denied or be Kore-eda.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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