Hirokazu Koreeda, possibly Japan's greatest living director, has moved abroad, to France actually, where he has made a film as good as anything he did back in his homeland. Like "Autumn Sonata", "La Verite" is another mother/daughter saga but without Bergman's sourness, not that Koreeda shirks the vitriol when he has to. Fabienne, an ageing French actress, played magnificently by that ageing French actress, Catherine Deneuve, can be a Bette Davis-style bitch and her daughter, a script writer living in America and played superbly by the equally legendary Juliette Binoche, isn't too happy that her mother has written her memoirs without first consulting her. And then, of course, there's the new movie Fabienne is making, a sci-fi film about mother/daughter relationships in which she plays the oldest version of her character.Koreeda has great fun picking apart the ego of this French Margo Channing yet treating the film-making process with the affection he so obviously feels for it. In this respect he's closer to Truffaut than Wilder but then again this isn't so much a picture about the cinema as it is about relationships, the family dynamic and simply growing old and while the characters in the film can sometimes be cruel there doesn't appear to be a mean bone in Koreeda's body. A truly lovely picture.
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