Deneuve goes full diva in 'The Truth'

Director Hirokazu Koreeda leaves Japan to direct The Truth, a movie about the relationship between an aging actress (Catherine Deneuve) and her grown daughter (Juliette Binoche).  Setting his story in Paris, Koreeda focuses on characters struggling to live with years of lies and resentments — all while simply trying to survive a family visit.

The story centers on Deneuve’s Fabienne Dangeville, a celebrated French actress who’s no longer landing the great roles. It seems as if Fabienne was written for Deneuve who takes over the part with easy command and flashes of callous wit. Accustomed to getting her way, Fabienne refuses to be anything less than the center of attention, even when she’s playing a supporting role in a movie featuring an up-and-coming new actress (Manon Clavel).

Koreeda embeds the story's familial tensions in a typical scenario. Binoche’s Lumir, her American husband Hank (Ethan Hawke), and their young daughter (Clementine Grenier) arrive from the US to help celebrate the publication of Fabienne’s memoir. 

By trade, daughter and son-in-law instantly find themselves in competition with Fabienne. Lumir writes screenplays: Hank acts — although his career seems to be going nowhere and his battles with the bottle have made trips to rehab a regular feature on his calendar.

Lumir regards her mother’s autobiography as a self-aggrandizing work of fiction. Lumir finds Fabienne's attempts to portray herself as a devoted mother laughable. Fabienne never cared as much about her daughter as she did about her career.

Fabienne clearly expresses the priorities that govern her life; i.e., the truths that never made it into her book, which ironically she has entitled The Truth. Fabienne would rather be regarded as a good actress than a good mother, for example. She doesn’t allow for the possibility that one might be both.

The atmosphere isn't venomous, but no one escapes Fabienne's tendency to regard others as instruments of her will. Fabienne's long-time agent and adviser (Alain Libolt) must suffer the shame of never being mentioned in his client's book, for example.

To add a mirror-like twist, Koreeda takes us to the set of the new sci-fi movie on which Fabienne has begun work. She's playing the daughter of a mother who travels into space to avoid dying from a terminal disease. Fabienne portrays the daughter when she’s old, near death, and still dealing with a youthful mother who’s only able to visit Earth periodically. The neglectful mother is playing the neglected daughter.

A running theme of accusation also emerges. Fabienne once out-maneuvered a close friend — now deceased — out of a part that brought Fabienne a coveted Cesar Award. Lumir presses her mother to feel something akin to guilt. Fabienne will have none of it. For her, the world and its occupants exist primarily as source material for her work.

Those familiar with Koreeda’s movies (Shoplifters, After Life) know that he favors an unhurried style that allows an audience to get to know his characters. I wouldn’t say that The Truth represents Koreeda’s best work, but Koreeda knows how to put teeth into a drama that seldom erupts, bleeds, or screams. He may not go for the kill, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know where the wounds are.

Capturing the rhythms of real life

Director Hirokazu Koreeda tells a story about a man who has lost his way -- and many not want a map.

Hollywood-style, delusional escapism remains foreign to Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda. Koreeda (Our Little Sister and Like Father, Like Son) doesn't make movies that bang home plot points with sledgehammer force.

Instead of reaching out and dragging us into his films, Koreeda allows us enough space to approach situations that resist melodramatic overstatement. Slowly and deftly, he entangles us in the lives of his characters.

In his new film, After the Storm, Koreeda focuses on Ryota Shinoda (Hiroshi Abe), a man who's approaching middle age with only one achievement under his belt: He wrote a prize-winning first novel. Since then Ryota has accomplished virtually nothing. He works for a low-grade detective agency, gambles away whatever money he earns, and generally fails to meet any of the responsibilities that a husband and father should meet, which is why his marriage fell apart.

Ryota may be another the many movie men who refuse to grow up, but as the long-faced Abe plays him, he's hardly despicable. Although he treats child support payments with indifference and isn't above asking his appropriately judgmental sister (Satomi Kobayashi) for money, he clearly loves his son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa).

Ryota also frets about his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, a guy who buys Shingo the baseball glove that Ryota had promised to deliver. Ryota knows he's a man who can't be relied on to keep a promise, but still resents the role another man might play in his son's life.

If the plot has a prime mover, the role falls to Ryota's mother (Kirin Kiki). She understands that her son is very much like his late father, a man who made frequent visits to the local pawn shop to support his gambling habits. Mom lives in a suburban apartment complex. She wonders when her son will buy her a better apartment. Her face and manner tell us that she knows that's wishful thinking.

Like many older people, Kiki's character seems resigned to her fate, but not without showing traces of humor and spunk.

The storm of the title arrives in the form of a typhoon that strands Ryota, his former wife and his young son at his mother's apartment. As she contemplates her own demise, Ryota's aging mother hopes that she can help reconstitute the family her son shattered, but Mom is no dope. She knows she's working against very long odds.

It's possible to conjecture that the storm of the title is not the typhoon that slams into this coastal suburb, but the series of events that broke Ryota's family apart in the first place.

Koreeda -- who works with an unfussy camera -- takes us through a transitional period in Ryota's life, although it's not clear that he'll ever defeat the psychological demons that keep him from fulfilling his promise.

If you're after cinematic flamboyance, Koreeda probably isn't your kind of director. But if you have a taste for a movie that tries to show us the consternation of characters whose lives haven't worked out as anticipated, you may well find yourself warming to a movie that looks at lives that are not very far from our own -- unless, of course, you're one of those rare souls who's living precisely the life you imagined for yourself when once you were young.

Four sisters, one beautiful movie

Japan's Our Little Sister is a quiet gem.

Many of the life-changing events that determine the shape of the Japanese movie Our Little Sister take place before the movie begins, shattering personal developments that the characters already seem too have incorporated into their very beings.

Those with a taste for deliberately paced cinema with a deep humanistic streak will find ample pleasures in director Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest, the story of three grown sisters who attend their father's funeral and learn they have a 14-year-old half sister. The three women hadn't seen their father for 15 years.

As the story unfolds, we come to understand that the three sisters grew up on their own. Their late father fell for another woman and moved to another city. Overwhelmed by her husband's departure and daunted by the task of raising three children, Mom took off, as well.

As it turns out, the three sisters have settled into a routine. Haruka Ayase plays Sachi, the oldest and take-charge sister. Masami Nagasawa portrays the second oldest sister, a woman who works in a bank and seems to have questionable taste in men. Kaho, an actress and model, plays the youngest and most free-spirited sister.

Once Dad's funeral concludes, Sachi invites half-sister Suzu -- who faces life with a step-mother she can't stand -- to live with the sisters. Suzu's mother evidently passed away, leaving Dad to marry for a third time.

Suzu quickly adjusts to life in a new city, the coastal town of Kamakura. She makes friends and continues to develop bonds of affection with the sisters who clearly provide her with an emotionally supportive environment she very much needs.

Kore-eda (Like Father Like Son) makes it clear that young Suzu is learning how to be a woman from her three sisters, who also manage to charm an audience as much as the cherry blossoms that become the movie's symbol of renewed life and fleeting beauty.

A relationship between Sachi, the responsible older sister, and a married pediatric surgeon brings the movie close to a melodramatic plot twist, but Kore-eda remains far more interested in the rhythms of ordinary life than in romantic developments.

So when the characters gather for a meal at the local diner, run by an old and reliable friend, we're happy to be there with them. We're reassured when they carry on the family tradition of making plum wine.

Our Little Sister is like a reflecting pool: The surface may be calm, but emotions ripple deep beneath its surface and can be savored long after this lifelike portrait reaches its satisfying conclusion.

You'll have to make up your own mind about Yoko Kanno's lush score. I remain undecided about it, but I'd still insist that Our Little Sister feels as effortless as a summer breeze and should provide just as much relief for cinema-parched audiences. We should be grateful.