Butler's Cinema Scene

Catherine Deneuve

“THE TRUTH” My rating: B

106 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

The character played by Catherine Deneuve in “The Truth” is reprehensible.

Except that she’s played by Catherine Deneuve, which means her reprehensibleness is actually kind of awesome.

In the latest from  Hirokazu Koreeda (a Japanese director making a French movie…talk about cross-cultural pollination) Deneuve plays Fabienne Dangeville, a great beauty of the French cinema who, now well ensconced in her 70s, has just published a memoir called “La Verite” (“the Truth”).

Fabienne has been a star for so long, has spent so much of her life being fawned over, that she has an iron-clad if overinflated sense of her own wonderfulness.  She expects people to cater to her every whim, and has a wickedly sharp tongue with which she lacerates friend and foe alike.

Imagine a Maggie Smith character coupled with world-class sex appeal.

Koreeda’s screenplay follows Fabienne on two fronts.  Professionally she’s taken a supporting role on a low-budget science fiction film starring young actress Manon Lenoir (Manon Clavel), who’s being touted as the next Fabienne Dangeville. You can imagine Fabienne’s dim view of that assertion.

On a personal level, Fabienne is dealing with a visit from her semi-estranged daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), a New York-based screenwriter who’s returned to her childhood home with her actor husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) and their precocious bilingual daughter Charlotte (Clementine Grenier).

When little Charlotte exclaims that Grandma’s house looks like a castle, Lumir glumly notes, “Yes, and there’s a prison just behind it.”  True.  The family manse abuts a maximum security facility, and it’s pretty obvious that in Lumir’s mind the two properties are interchangeable.

Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke

It immediately becomes obvious that Lumir has lots of baggage to unpack.  She’s appalled that Fabienne’s memoir paints the actress as a great mother, when in fact Lumir spent most of her childhood feeling neglected.

“I’m an actress,” Mama sniffs when her fabrications are called out. “I can’t tell the  naked truth. It’s far from interesting.”

Besides, she adds, “Isn’t a little neglect better than a helicopter mom?”

Lumir’s arrival coincides with the imminent departure of Fabienne’s  faithful factotum Luc  (Alain Libolt), who after decades of service has finally had his fill of abuse and indifference.  It’s a good thing Fabienne’s chef Jacques (Christian Crahay) is still on board…but then she augments his wages by sleeping with him.

When not wading through the hot bath of resentments that is Fabienne’s family, the film turns to the set of her new movie, where she lives in a bubble of smug superiority and throws her weight around whenever possible.  When Lumir suggests she might want to learn her lines, Fabienne zaps back “I would, if the script were better.”

For all her tough exterior, though, Fabienne is shaken by the project, in which she plays the Earthbound daughter of a woman astronaut who returns from space every few decades having aged hardly at all.  Meanwhile the daughter is played by several actresses of varying ages…Fabienne’s is the oldest rendition.

This may be just a bit too close to home for comfort.

There are no earth-shaking revelations in “The Truth.” Fabienne simply made a choice to be a bad mother and friend and a good actress. But as we learn more about this woman, her career, and the creeping specter of mortality, Deneuve finds Fabienne and her career, we begin to see her in a somewhat more charitable light.

We’re all human, after all.

| Robert W. Butler