Film Reviews by CH

This is visually a beautiful film and often selfconsciously "witty", in the literary sense, with a regular thematic word-play on "truth", "accuracy", "memory", "reality" and of course "play" itself, which becomes the more striking when one hears the French "jouer" and sees it translated as "acted". The semantic gap between playing and acting is in this film exploited almost

as freely as it is, say, in "Hamlet", with the great difference that in "The Truth" the pun is comic rather than tragic. It's a pleasure to watch and frequently funny, Deneuve and Binoche are brilliant, but to my mind the real star is Clémentine Grenier, the wonderful child actor who plays Charlotte, Lumir's daughter and Fabienne's granddaughter. In the end, though, it seemed to me more forgiving than perhaps it should have been. There is much in "The Truth" that recalls the 1978 Bergman film "Autumn Sonata", starring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, which also brought a famous mother and a troubled daughter together and also explored episodes in the mother's past which were equally shameful but not so easily glossed over. That earlier film wasn't amusing and not really conclusive, but maybe it was starker and didn't give in to the genial sentimentality which I think is the final flaw of "The Truth".

There is no rhyme or reason to this film. Apart from the fact that Rachel's family all seem to be selfish, vague and half-witted, the Russell Crowe character is ridiculously overdone. We are supposed to believe that he could beat up and kill a man in a diner without any of the onlookers thinking to call the police. Then he proceeds to terrify Rachel by demanding one silly thing after another and she goes along with it when all she had to do is to turn her phone off and drive to the nearest police station. I daresay US police may not be too good, but I'm sure they're a bit quicker on the uptake than this. I suppose Russell Crowe was paid quite a lot for this but it's too stupid for words. Falling Down would presumably have been the model, but that was a far better film.