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.
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