Ever since she became established as one of Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux’s go-to favorites over a decade ago, Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase has been something of a subject of mild mockery among cineastes. For some, she’s never matched the quality of her 2007 breakthrough The Mourning Forest; for some, her propensity for glowing, golden sunrays backlighting shots of long hair in the wind or dappling through the trees is trite, lazy filmmaking. But what most who take aim at Kawase miss is that their derision is often trite, lazy misogyny, the simplistic misunderstandings of artistically narrow-minded, usually male commenters and “critics” bluntly refusing to engage with either a female filmmaker’s art or, as hers is, fundamentally feminine art.
True Mothers already defiantly asserts itself as fodder for said derision even before it’s begun. The very title implies not only a film focused on female characters but one informed by some of the key tenets of “feminine” art: sincerity, maternity and the fragmentation of perspective in its concern with two protagonists. Then, like the product of any good, principled auteur should, the film progresses with utter disregard for what its critics might say about it, for surely they were always going to say it anyway. Beams of sunny backlighting through windows? Check. Hair in the wind? Check. Shot upon shot dedicated solely to the documentation of delicate foliage? Check! Kawase follows a well-trodden path of Japanese filmmakers throughout cinema history, pursuing their own, personal artistic impulses regardless of what the wider world might make of it.
For that alone, True Mothers is a valuable addition to the Kawase canon. Unfortunately, it’s otherwise short on value overall. Though earnest, touching and resolutely well made, it fails to convince its audience of the depth of emotion driving its characters. For all the tenderness of her style, Kawase has never before been reluctant to yield to emotional intensity where her stories have called for it; in True Mothers, she maintains at a perpetual distance from her protagonists, observing and judging where she could be engaging with them and reciprocating the particular emotional timbre of their tales through technique and craft. Instead, True Mothers too often feels like a dispassionate chronicle of turbulent lives, like reading a Wikipedia entry on someone’s life, full of description but devoid of connection.
The mothers of the title are Hikari (Aju Makita) and Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaku), the former the biological mother of young Asato (Reo Sato), the latter his adoptive mother. The film opens with a somewhat redundant episode in which Asato is accused of injuring a friend at kindergarten, causing Satoko rather more concern than one might expect; the incident is not only never referred to again, it’s also of negligible psychological insight or thematic worth. Though it couldn’t be expected to inform much of what happens next, since what happens next is better described as what happened before: True Mothers is mostly a story told in extended flashbacks. A woman claiming to be Hikari, though appearing quite unlike the meek, sorrowful teenager Satoko and husband Kiyokazu (Arata Iura) met when they adopted their son seven years earlier, turns up out of nowhere demanding either that Asato be returned to her or she be paid.
And so we delve into both women’s respective pasts, each starting some time before Asato was handed over from birth mother to adoptive mother. Kawase’s telling of these stories is narratively without issue and structurally solid. She chronicles Satoko and Kiyokazu’s struggles to conceive and eventual delight at adopting with patient, unaffected empathy, then takes the viewer through young Hikari’s accidental teenage pregnancy and experience at the Baby Baton home for expectant mothers who’ve chosen to give their babies away with a compassion that’s both gentle and genuine. In Hikari’s case, she hasn’t so much chosen this option as been forced into it by uncaring parents of her own, unwilling to help raise the child for the societal shame it might cost them, yet quite willing to tell their whole extended family of their daughter’s circumstances. Her time at the Baby Baton home is where True Mothers seems to find its purpose, becoming a deeply felt, almost documentary-like ensemble piece, a heartfelt sideways glance into the modern-day place of women both within Japanese society and, for the misfits at the home, at least temporarily ostracized from it.
Kawase’s style isn’t what lets her down – the occasional insertions of her signature winsome nature shots feel neither out of place nor overly intrusive, though they don’t exactly add anything to an otherwise plot-focused film. Instead, it’s the inevitable mundanity of that plot. It progresses past the adoption to examine how our characters have come to a place where the life of a seven-year-old child is being used as a negotiating tool and it manages this progression with increasingly tiresome banality. It becomes clear that Kawase doesn’t have much to say about these women and their lives beyond the obvious and she oversees their development – Hikari’s in particular – with a shallow dependence upon narrative shortcuts. That’s disappointing enough, then the film takes a predictable turn into blunt moralizing and the disappointment is only compounded.
Contrary to the complaints of her critics, Kawase’s feminine artistic trademarks are among the most worthy traits of her films, consistent as they are from her very best to her very worst, ensuring that “worst” is, here, a strictly relative term. She’ll likely never make an outright bad film. But in True Mothers, she’s lost her way a little and made a potentially good film marred by some bad decisions. She’s done better before and she’ll almost certainly do better again.
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