Hirokazu Koreeda is riding high right now, with his latest film Shoplifters scoring the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes just days ago. So this is the perfect time to start building up hype for his next film, which already had a decent amount of buzz for pairing up French superstars Juliette Binoche and Catherine Deneuve. Now the film has a title, a synopsis, and another French actress of some renown at the top of the bill.
Koreeda’s film is titled The Truth About Catherine, and will mark his first movie set outside of Japan. Swimming Pool and The Young Pope star Ludivine Sagnier has joined Binoche and Deneuve in the cast, and as a huge fan of all three I have to say this is one of the most exciting casts of the year already. Nothing on Ethan Hawke who was previously said to be in the film, too.
While the film sticks with Koreeda’s core theme of complicated family dynamics, the synopsis shows that he’s taking a meta approach with this particular story…
Catherine is a star; a star of French cinema. She reigns amongst men who love and admire her: her new partner, her former husband, her agent… When she publishes her memoirs, her daughter Juliette (who has moved to the States to get away from her overbearing mother) returns to France with her husband and young child. The reunion between mother and daughter will quickly turn to confrontation: truths will be told, accounts settled, loves and resentments confessed. All under the astonished eyes of the men. At the same time, Catherine is acting in a sci-fi movie, playing a mother who never grows old… For his first feature set outside Japan, Kore-eda unites French screen legends Deneuve and Binoche in a powerful and emotional story of family conflicts.
No word on when this will premiere but we can likely expect it in 2019, probably just in time for Cannes.
