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.
Japan’s Naomi Kawase is among the tenderest of filmmakers you can often sense her caring presence off-camera, in a good way and her latest, “True Mothers,” is a fine example of this Cannes-honored director’s sensitivity and lyricism. They’re especially strong assets here, because this story of teen pregnancy, adoption, and belonging adapted from a novel by Mizuki Tsujimura is the kind of material that can easily lend itself to melodrama. In Kawase’s delicate hands, however, it breathes with an everyday poignancy.
We first meet kind, anxious Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaku) and her devoted husband (Arata Iura) as the parents of 6-year-old Asato, a sweet-faced boy entering kindergarten. An extended flashback fills in an emotionally wrought backstory: after fertility treatments went nowhere, the distraught couple turned to an adoption agency that houses young women with unwanted pregnancies and upon the handing over of the newborn, legally terminates any relationship with the
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