Too soon! Comma or not, the English-language title of Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda often wrenching new family drama (winner of the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival) bears too distinct a resemblance to the name of 1987’s universally beloved Dudley Moore/Kirk Cameron starter. What’s next, Japan? A movie whose title translates into "Gone, With The Wind?"
Okay, that’s enough out of me. But in all seriousness, the not inapt but too on-the-nose English language title of "Soshite chichi ni naru" (which, Google Translate tells me, works out to something like "And I Will Be His Father") is the worst thing about this movie. Kore-eda, whose pictures don’t exactly alternate between soulful, understated fantastic fables ("Afterlife," "Air Doll") and quiet family dramas ("Still Walking"), brings his trademark delicate but deliberate eye (and ear) to a really heartbreaking scenario. Six years into raising their only child Keita, whose birth left the young mother unable to have any more children, young couple Ryota and Midori are told that the child is not, in fact, theirs at all: that a hospital error switched two baby boys at birth. Soon the couple are meeting their biological child for the first time, along with the family that raised him.