Film Reviews by CH

This is a charmless film. Redford looks like a gargoyle and Sissy Spacek depends on a quirky smile to show that it's light-hearted. Casey Affleck mumbles and stumbles his way through a particularly inept police operation that gives a disreputable old villain more free time than he deserves. That this is apparently a true story doesn't say much about the US police force, and we are presumably encouraged to think that theft and the threat of violence is heartwarming if perpetrated by an old man with a serious psychological problem.

This is a posturing film that makes no sense. Dustin Hoffman speaks English while all around are Italian. There is a kidnapped girl who may be crazy. An oldish man dying of something mysterious sets out for no discernible reason to find out what happened to her and finds ( in the eerie basement of a church) a creepy man who sends him looking for a chap who wears a rabbit mask. Things happen in the end but it's not made clear what exactly as the protagonists may or may not be dead. The Italian police, not surprisingly, are very bad-tempered indeed.

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.