One of the things I've liked so much about the four Hirokazu Kore-eda movies I've seen is that they focus on normal people, dealing with a heightened sense of normal life.
As the Japanese master has made his first non-Japanese language film, he's made a change in his subject matter as well, and not a welcome one.
Instead of normal people dealing with heightened reality, it's famous people ruminating on the banal.
The Truth is in French with a little bit of English -- they don't make Ethan Hawke work too hard, so his scenes are mostly English. That itself is not the problem with the movie, as other great international directors, such as Bong Joon-ho and Asghar Farhadi, have made movies outside their native tongue with impeccable results. There's no reason to think Kore-eda shouldn't be capable of the same.
No, it's that by making the characters celebrities -- Catherine Deneuve a multi-Cesar winning actress, Hawke a TV actor -- Kore-eda has decided he no longer cares about the travails of ordinary people.
In the past, I've been likely to dub Kore-eda the modern-day successor to Yasujiro Ozu, as his films are replete with the dynamics and sometimes heartbreaking betrayals of unremarkable Japanese families. Sometimes there would be a high-concept plot -- like the infants switched at birth story of Like Father, Like Son -- but it was always normal people that these high-concept plots happened to. Another example of this would be the non-biological "family" of grifters in Shoplifters.
The basic humility of the characters was something I cherished. The other two films of his I've seen -- After the Storm and Our Little Sister -- deal especially in these characters' core modesty. They have hopes and dreams like everyone, but they aren't attention seekers.
Deneuve's character is like the embodiment of the polar opposite of everything Kore-eda has previously stood for. She's vain, self-centered, jealous of the attention received by others. She lives her life on the stage.
Hawke has more of that modesty going for him, but there's something so insubstantial about his character, who really is just a hanger-on at the periphery of this story, that one wonders why he's even really in it. He's the husband of Juliette Binoche's character, who is Deneuve's daughter and the only unfamous one of the three. But he's so free and easy and a goofy dad that it's almost like he's in the movie as a light parody of Americans.
Deneuve, meanwhile, does that thing that everyone does in movies about fading greats, where she looks out of the corner of her eyes at people who represent threats to her, when she's not looking down her nose at them..
I'm just not that interested in yet another story about an actress (or actor, it doesn't have to be an actress but it usually is) who is nearing the end of her career and is ungracefully accepting her faded glory. There's something fatally solipsistic about it. I suppose all movies about aging are solipsistic in a way, but when it relates to a person who seems to have been self-centered even when she was a young woman, it feels even more self-indulgent.
I guess I just don't understand why this subject interested Kore-eda. I can see why he wanted to work with these actors, all of whom are or have been brilliant, but I don't see why this particular story needed to be told. And if you've got one famous person in it, it feels like you're just doubling down by making another of the main characters famous as well. It start to seem more like an exercise in glamorous, movie industry navel-gazing than a story of something true and real that we might all encounter in our everyday lives
In the end I liked enough about The Truth to give it a marginal recommendation if anyone were to ask me -- three stars out of five. But you can see how this is a disappointment by Kore-eda's standards, as he's previously received five stars (Like Father, Like Son), four-and-a-half stars (Shoplifters), four stars (After the Storm) and three-and-a-half stars (Our Little Sister) from me. If he's going to keep up this pattern of having each film earn a different star rating from me, I don't like where things are going to go from here.
But he shouldn't, as Kore-eda is a good filmmaker -- a great one, even. But even great filmmakers sometimes abandon their core artistic preoccupations at their peril, and I just don't want to see it happen for this guy.
In the past, I've been likely to dub Kore-eda the modern-day successor to Yasujiro Ozu, as his films are replete with the dynamics and sometimes heartbreaking betrayals of unremarkable Japanese families. Sometimes there would be a high-concept plot -- like the infants switched at birth story of Like Father, Like Son -- but it was always normal people that these high-concept plots happened to. Another example of this would be the non-biological "family" of grifters in Shoplifters.
The basic humility of the characters was something I cherished. The other two films of his I've seen -- After the Storm and Our Little Sister -- deal especially in these characters' core modesty. They have hopes and dreams like everyone, but they aren't attention seekers.
Deneuve's character is like the embodiment of the polar opposite of everything Kore-eda has previously stood for. She's vain, self-centered, jealous of the attention received by others. She lives her life on the stage.
Hawke has more of that modesty going for him, but there's something so insubstantial about his character, who really is just a hanger-on at the periphery of this story, that one wonders why he's even really in it. He's the husband of Juliette Binoche's character, who is Deneuve's daughter and the only unfamous one of the three. But he's so free and easy and a goofy dad that it's almost like he's in the movie as a light parody of Americans.
Deneuve, meanwhile, does that thing that everyone does in movies about fading greats, where she looks out of the corner of her eyes at people who represent threats to her, when she's not looking down her nose at them..
I'm just not that interested in yet another story about an actress (or actor, it doesn't have to be an actress but it usually is) who is nearing the end of her career and is ungracefully accepting her faded glory. There's something fatally solipsistic about it. I suppose all movies about aging are solipsistic in a way, but when it relates to a person who seems to have been self-centered even when she was a young woman, it feels even more self-indulgent.
I guess I just don't understand why this subject interested Kore-eda. I can see why he wanted to work with these actors, all of whom are or have been brilliant, but I don't see why this particular story needed to be told. And if you've got one famous person in it, it feels like you're just doubling down by making another of the main characters famous as well. It start to seem more like an exercise in glamorous, movie industry navel-gazing than a story of something true and real that we might all encounter in our everyday lives
In the end I liked enough about The Truth to give it a marginal recommendation if anyone were to ask me -- three stars out of five. But you can see how this is a disappointment by Kore-eda's standards, as he's previously received five stars (Like Father, Like Son), four-and-a-half stars (Shoplifters), four stars (After the Storm) and three-and-a-half stars (Our Little Sister) from me. If he's going to keep up this pattern of having each film earn a different star rating from me, I don't like where things are going to go from here.
But he shouldn't, as Kore-eda is a good filmmaker -- a great one, even. But even great filmmakers sometimes abandon their core artistic preoccupations at their peril, and I just don't want to see it happen for this guy.
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