Review of The Truth

The Truth (2019)
6/10
Maze of truth
30 April 2020
Warning: Spoilers
As the "truth" of the title, in fact, it has provided the core clue for reading this work. The misplacement between other things and the truth, as well as the characters 'efforts to get closer to the truth, have constructed Zhiyu and the most complicated intertextual maze to date. The family plot that he is good at is just a single wall in this maze.

The protagonist of this film, Fabienne, is a famous French actress. It is difficult for us to associate this character with the actor Catherine Deneuve who played her. Taking advantage of the publication of her memoirs, her daughter Lumir (Juliet Binoche) returned to Paris with her husband and children. However, this journey revealed a series of memories of mother and daughter mixed with pain and injury.

During Lumir's visit, Fabienne was still shooting a film called "Memories of My Mother". This "play-in-play" is adapted from the science fiction novel of the same name by Chinese writer Liu Yukun. In this novel, a mother who is seriously ill and has only two years of life, in order to be able to witness the growth of her daughter, took a spaceship to join the universe, trying to slow down the time process.

From this novel, we can realize the first kind of dislocation discussed in "Truth"-the dislocation of space-time and truth.



If the dislocation of time and space maps to the dissipated real world, then the dislocation of narrative maps to the void in which the signifier and the signified refer to the effortless search for meaning structures. Her daughter traveled thousands of miles to Paris just to find "your own story", and her mother's writing of memoirs was also to finalize "your own past". But it is clear that they failed after all.

Of course, in this intertextual labyrinth that uses the "meta-film" structure, the most complicated is still the misalignment of art and truth.

In Liu Yukun 's novel, the sick mother chose the "extended" spaceship as a refuge. For Fabienne, film art is both a disease and a refuge. Will circuitous rhetoric and polished aesthetics really be more reliable than one-sided narratives?

Fabienne is undoubtedly a quite conceited actor, but she also has conceited capital. For her, suffering is the material of creation, and all the pain is to help her create better performances. But from another perspective, the movie has also devoured her life, making her family and friendship a victim.

But the movie did not help her find the truth. Like an undead, Sara's incarnation still haunts her. Catherine Deneuve used that amazing performance to show us a bit of hesitation hidden under the rocky iron surface. For her, the movie may always be "the asymptote of truth".
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