"The Truth" is an international, multi-contextual, cross-cultural attempt by director Hirokazu Kore-eda after "Thief Family" won the Palme d'Or. The director, who has been focusing on the exploration of Japanese family relations, still has not given up his best and most focused spiritual core, lightly sketching the emotional bondage between entangled family members, but this time it is placed in the Western context of different concepts of life, in the real and fictional memory, under the palindrome of drama and reality, to find the truth of love. Eastern and Western cultures collide with unexpected sparks, and also convey the universal value of family affection and love from the side.
On the other hand, the director's intention to seek innovation and change and jump out of the comfort zone is very obvious. He abandons the soothing delicate picture and the Japanese implicit in the unspoken, and adopts the rhythm and expression similar to Hou Mai's film to advance the plot. He cleverly chose Liu Yukun's novel Memories of His Mother (which was once adapted into the science fiction short film "Beautiful Dreamer") as a nesting of plays within a play. The science fiction short stories of Chinese writers make the film retain the Eastern concept of family on the most inconspicuous deep foundation.
The story of the film begins with the memoir published by Fabian, a famous actress played by Catherine Denaf, called "The Truth", and the memoir, a genre full of personal memories and private feelings, has been carefully selected, intercepted, spliced, imagined, exaggerated and fabricated by the selfish, poisonous tongue, and actress who is focused on acting and even unscrupulous means to get the role, which triggers a chain reaction among family members after publication. The narrative text, on the other hand, tries to restore the most authentic mother-daughter relationship in the fog of memory.
The structure of this film seems sparse and ordinary, but in fact, the beginning and end echoes are extremely exquisite. The resignation of the housekeeper in the opening scene echoes the retirement of the agent behind, paving the way for fabian's extreme self-inflicted emotional damage to the people around him; the visit of the daughter's family after 7 years, connecting with the mother and daughter who can only see each other every 7 years in the subsequent play, hinting at Fabian's deep desire for a family relationship; the previous giant turtle Pi'el, interlocking with the later witch role and Pi'er's grandfather, cleverly set off the humorous and playful side of the actress, and also laid the groundwork for the final truth and the end of the truth. Through these seemingly unimportant details, in the promotion of the story and the accumulation of emotions in the neat and progressive layers, the true characters of the characters and the truth of the past are presented to the audience like a cocoon.
It is worth mentioning that no flashback is used in the whole film. Although the reproduction of memory has a natural subjective nature, the flashback shot has an overly clear hint of authenticity. Although the memories of the past are shared, everyone's narrative is one-sided and mutilated, and the memories of the past will only capture fragments that they are willing to believe due to different observation angles and positions, will tamper with some facts, and will also try to make up reasonable reasons for the past that they do not want to face. Through the dislocation between memory and truth, the projection and reflection of the play within the play, and the gradual removal of falsehood and truth when stitching together the fragments of the past, the director constructs a complex intertextual labyrinth.
The film is silently laid out with lies, misunderstandings and truths: the mother takes on the role of an unpleasant witch only because her daughter likes the picture book; Fabian watches her daughter's performance but does not want to bring pressure and does not tell; the mother treasures the clothes of her best friend, and the real reason for accepting the invitation to a small production science fiction film with few lines is that the heroine resembles her young friend. These truths are hidden under the hard shell of the mother, passing through her casual tone, and Deneuve vividly shows the contradiction between the cold and hot character of the character and the appearance of refusing to be thousands of miles away with her unmistakable precision acting skills. She loved her daughter but was always picky, so much so that her daughter married to the United States, and the mother-daughter relationship was estranged; she deeply missed her deceased best friend, but she still can't let go of the competition in the past; she and her agent were as close as family, but they could never remember the names of each other's six grandchildren; in her world, only the love of acting was unwavering, and everything in reality was at the service of performance and role. For her, suffering can be turned into the foundation of creation, and pain is the accumulation of life experience. Life and acting have blurred the boundaries of each other, so that there is no ready-made script, and they seem so helpless in the face of unexpected situations in life, and so clumsy in love when their true feelings are revealed.
"Do you love yourself, or do you love movies?"
"I love the movies I make."
Just two sentences of dialogue, coupled with the micro-expression change from initial confusion to instant firmness, conceit and naturalization, express the personality traits of this superstar who loves drama and is deeply rooted in the bone and true and credible. Deneuve's nested and interconnected performances richly restore the actress's success, conceit, poisonous tongue, the appearance of fame and fortune and the core of love.
In this film, the director conceals his trademark personal style to bridge the cultural and linguistic gap of the international team, just as the son-in-law and mother-in-law who do not know French in the film do not have communication barriers, but play a lubricating role in reconciling family conflicts. This character is more like the projection of the director himself who does not know English or French in the play. He does not deliberately or emphasize, but silently collaborates with cast members with very different working modes, and subtly completes the cross-context empathy between the audience and the characters in the play.
Some people say that this film is not satisfied, but slowly taste and carefully observe, is Kore-eda or the gentle director, the story still revolves around a family, there is no big right and wrong, there is no great tragedy, lies are harmless, the truth is not ugly, just because of finding the lost puzzle, and more complete and more sincere. Love is not fierce, but it is always haunting each other's immediate attention.
The film repeatedly emphasizes that not far from the old house is a prison. Home is a place to show the true self, not a place to imprison personality, the bondage between members is love rather than a cage, when the truth is released from the confinement, the elimination of misunderstanding ushers in the harmony of the family. And Fabian has also changed from a fearsome "witch" to an ordinary old lady who is still poisonous, a little strange tempered, but very cute in her bones.
The film begins with a tree in the courtyard and ends with it, as a witness to the truth, looking down on the family's inseparable family affection in the picturesque autumn colors of Paris, and the director's light, clean and elegant audiovisual language is once again an inspiration.