True Mothers review – tender Japanese adoption drama theguardian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theguardian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
âTrue Mothersâ Review: Family Entanglements
Parents clash in this Japanese melodrama from Naomi Kawase.
Aju Makita in “True Mothers.”Credit.Film Movement
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Remarkably resistant to sentimentality in individual scenes yet baldly manipulative in the big picture, the melodrama âTrue Mothersâ is probably the most mainstream effort yet from Naomi Kawase, a Japanese director who hasnât received much distribution in the United States but has been a mainstay of the Cannes Film Festival for two decades. Although the pandemic canceled the festival in May, in June the Cannes programmers announced âTrue Mothersâ as an official selection of the event-that-wasnât (and later screened it at a mini-festival in October). The movie has the sort of densely plotted texture and widely accessible emotions that might have earned it the Palme dâOr