The Irresistible Drama of Becoming Who You Want to Be

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film, The Truth, ends as many of his films do, with a group of people walking. Some of them are related; some are not. Some know exactly where they’re going and why; others are just tagging along, enjoying the exercise and the company. The person who seems most determined, surest of what she’s doing, is a septuagenarian movie star named Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), in whose wake the others appear to follow. She’s on her way to a film studio to reshoot an emotional scene that she feels she didn’t get right the day before—though everyone else thought it marvelous—because her real life has intervened. The previous night, at the end of a long, cathartic heart-to-heart with her daughter, Lumir (Juliette Binoche), Fabienne suddenly sat up straight and blurted out, “Why didn’t I play it like this? Why didn’t I think of it!” And in that moment, this great French actor expresses the essential subject of this great: people wondering how to play their lives, and why they can’t seem to get it right the first time.