Speaking of the most popular directors in Japan, Kore-eda is among them.
"Sea Street Diary", "Like a Father Like a Son", "Deeper Than the Sea", "Non-stop"... In all his previous works, family relations are an inextricable subject. The trivialities of daily life, the bland and soothing narrative, the delicate emotional depiction, his films always reveal a faint poetry.
This unique style of imaging has also become his label. When it comes to "Japanese family films", the first thing that most fans think of is that the director is "Kore-eda".
In 2018, he won the Palme d'Or for "Thief Family", becoming a hot Asian director in the European film industry.
Kore-eda who went to the international stage, followed by the launch of a new work -
《True Picture》
The Truth is a French film and the first foreign language film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda.
The first time to test the waters of European literary and artistic films, it was an opportunity and a challenge for Kore-eda. Some people are looking forward to this Japanese-French meal, while others are worried about the quality of this transnational cooperation film.
However, it was Kore-eda who gathered a lot of popularity in the European film industry with "Thief Family", inviting two post-film French actresses Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche to participate, and american actor Ethan Hawke joined, just from the cast, it has been expected to burst.
Last year, "The Truth" was shortlisted for the Venice Film Festival and was selected as the opening film. After the release, it also ushered in the evaluation of all parties. At present, the film has only a rating of 6.5 on IMDb, and Douban has a 7.2.
The low rating once made the landlord suspect that this was another street-beating work, after all, foreign language films directed by famous Asian directors such as Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, and Ang Lee had also encountered the same situation.
But after watching the film, the landlord dispelled this concern. Just to say, it's good not to miss it because of the rating.
The film continues the family narrative of Hirokazu Kore-eda, revolving around a pair of star mothers and daughters, telling the tender story of what happened between them.
Her mother, Fabienne, is a superstar in the French film industry and was once a household name on the screen.
In the twilight of the year, the charm still exists, and even the temper and disposition are not reduced. In the interview with the reporter at the beginning, it was full of arrogance and conceit, even with a little meanness and ruthlessness.
Unwilling to answer questions asked by other media, he mistakenly believed that one of his fellow actresses had passed away and had attended each other's funerals.
Because one of Fabienne's memoirs was published, her daughter Lumir brought her husband, Hank, and her young daughter home to celebrate.
Lumir and her mother were estranged. When she was a child, her mother was so busy with her work that she neglected to take care of her. Growing up, Lumir became a screenwriter, escaped from his mother, and went to the United States to marry and have children.
This time home, on the surface, is a celebration, but in fact, Lumir wants to see what is written in his mother's autobiography? Do you feel guilty about past mistakes in life? Feeling remorse for ignoring your daughter?
Of course, none of these books are there. In Fabienne's memoirs, she not only portrayed herself as a good wife and mother, but also said nothing about her former friend Sara, assistant Luc, and even wrote about it directly because of her dislike for her ex-husband.
Arguably, Fabienne's autobiography is full of lies. This upset her daughter Lumir, who questioned her mother, who retorted:
"I'm an actor, I can't tell the naked truth, the truth can't move people."
The mother's arrogance makes the daughter miss the deceased actress Sara even more, and compared to Fabienne, her good friend Sara accompanies Lumir's growth, more like a mother.
At this time, Fabienne also happened to take on a new play, in which she worked with the young actress Manon to play a mother and daughter.
In addition, due to fabienne's assistant running away, Lumir had to temporarily replace him as his mother's personal assistant, and the relationship between the two quietly changed in this inseparable filming routine.
02
Although the film is French from the actors to the scenes, watching the whole movie, you can still smell the familiar and unique taste of Kore-eda.
The theme of the film is still about family relations, the picture style is still idyllic and calm, and the narrative of the story also has a strong oriental thinking, delicate and warm.
Audiences who are familiar with Kore-eda in presenting character relationships will find that the director is still keen to tell stories of reconciliation.
Many of the many people in "Deeper Than the Sea" were once award-winning writers, and now their lives are sloppy, relying on being a private detective and probing the privacy of others. The ex-wife couldn't bear it and left, and he eventually lived out to be his disgusted father. But with his mother's encouragement, he eventually reconciled with himself and continued this love to his son.
Many in "Non-Stop Walking", contrary to the expectations of the doctor's father, resolutely chose to paint the restorer, until after losing his job, he had to return to his hometown, and the family's relationship was finally eased during a beach walk.
The same is true of mother and daughter in The Truth. In the beginning, the relationship between the two was severed and opposed.
Fabienne regarded her career as an actress as the whole of her life, and her early achievements made her blind and even a little detached from reality, believing that drama was more important than life. He even said something like this:
"I'd rather be a bad mother, a bad friend, but also a great actress."
Her obsession with acting makes her always hurt the people around her. At a family dinner, she scoffed at the performance of her son-in-law, Hank, who was an American drama actress, believing that he was just imitating; but the daughter was also ruthless, immediately pointing out that her mother had acquired the role by sleeping with the director when she was young, replacing her friend Sara.
In her mind, the mother not only grossly failed in her duties, but also seemed to have questioned her personality and qualities. This also caused the relationship between the two to reach an impasse for a while.
During this time as a mother's assistant, Lumir began to really enter her mother's life and get to know the real her outside of the memory.
Here, the film cleverly uses the "play within a play" approach to correspond to the changes in the mother-daughter relationship in reality.
The play is called "Memories of My Mother" and is a real science fiction film in reality.
The original work was a science fiction short story created by Chinese-American science fiction writer Liu Yukun, which was later adapted into a short film "Beautiful Dreamer". It's about a terminally ill mother who decides to travel in space to prolong her life. She returns to Earth every seven years to visit her growing daughter.
In the play, Fabienne plays the role of an elderly daughter, while the young actor Manon plays her mother who can remain unchanged in space.
Compared with her younger actors, Fabienne is very angry, jealous of her beauty and youth, afraid that her light will overshadow herself. But she still tried her best to perform, and wanted to use the most perfect acting skills to prevent herself from being compared to her favorite acting career.
The mother-daughter relationship in the play makes Lumir realize the situation her mother faces in her profession. Fabienne actually gave too much to the profession of actress, how dazzling and excellent she once was, which gave her arrogant capital.
And now that she is getting older, time is slowly depriving her of her proud beauty, honor, and career, and this psychological imbalance is inevitable, so it will show such a thin and unkind.
The role of Fabienne is not difficult to think of the life trajectory of her actor Catherine Deneuve.
When she was young, she was elegant and charming, known as the "Ice Beauty". Starring in "Daytime Beauty" in 1966 made her famous. After that, she collaborated with famous European directors such as François Truffaut and Roman Polanski to shoot many masterpieces that have left a name in film history, and is a French national treasure actress.
The character of Fabienne is somehow a true portrayal of her life. Once magnificent, now the beauty is late. The arrogant heart does not diminish, but seeing the young actors emerge one after another, the loneliness and heartache in it are only known to themselves.
This kind of change is not only applicable to actors, but also to us ordinary people.
Parents who once thought that they were indestructible and tall and majestic, in the face of time, will slowly retreat to the state of children and become willful and vulnerable.
At this time, as a child, accepting and understanding this change of parents is also a process of reconciliation with oneself and life.
In the play, the reconciliation between the mother and daughter is to let go of the reticence and confide in her the truth. I actually went to see her childhood performances, and it was because of a certain play that she took. But her love for her daughter was always hidden under her disguised strength and coldness.
And the daughter's reconciliation with her mother is also quite moving. Lumir's younger daughter played a role of lubricant in it, and she had her little daughter cleverly tell her grandmother a white lie, which gave her mother great comfort.
Always paying attention to reality and paying attention to the truth, she reconciled with her mother in a lying way.
Kore-eda's most successful portrayal of family relationships is that the depiction of reconciliation between family members is never intensely sensational and deliberately close, but rather transmits signals just right and inadvertently triggers emotional resonance.
Brushing aside the fog created by memory, mother and daughter face the misunderstanding of each other after many years, and the truth of life surfaces. In the family relationship, is the truth important? The film doesn't give us a definitive answer in the end.
But if you look at kore-eda's films, you will find that he almost always presents the same theme in a poetic way: the preciousness of everyday life.
Compared with the memories that deceive us and make us dwell on the illusion of truth, perhaps the bond formed between the family is incomparably precious.
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