Written and Directed by Naomi Kawase
Starring Hiromi Nagasaku, Arata Iura, and Aju Makita
Running Time: 2 hours and 20 minutes
Playing in virtual cinemas starting Jan 29

by Dan Santelli, Staff Writer and Social Media Coordinator

Say the word “melodrama” and people may start rolling their eyes. No longer does it seem trendy to embrace a genre that gets its kicks from tugging at our heartstrings by way of purple machinations, grand gestures, and heightened emotions. This is all bad stuff, right? Well, different strokes for different folks, but I believe the worth of a filmed melodrama, like any film of any genre, should be judged on the basis of how constructively it explores and develops its premise and what kind of perspective the teller brings to the tale. There are other parameters to consider, but these two notions offer an unbiased critical springboard for evaluating a mode that too often is denied legitimacy.

In the new Japanese film True Mothers, adapted from an untranslated novel by Mizuki Tsujimura, veteran director Naomi Kawase tells the tale efficiently, but never quite transcends the limitations of the given material. Kawase is a filmmaker of aching sincerity, an attribute that can work for her and against her. There’s no sardonic undercurrent and little ironic distance to her approach, she’s not assuming the attitude of a Douglas Sirk or a Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In adapting True Mothers, she wears the story’s heart on her own sleeve, but also imbues it with a humanist sensitivity, a need to–quite literally, through flashback scenarios–understand all her characters’ dispositions and directions, regardless of whether they serve story mechanics more than their nature. If she doesn’t quite pull it off, it’s not for lack of trying.

The movie is at its strongest in the first hour. An affluent Tokyo couple, Satako (former J-pop idol Hiromi Nagasaku) and Kiyokazu Kurihara (Arata Iura, of Kore-eda’s After Life), live comfortably with their young son, Asato (Reo Sato). The early scenes highlight the everyday of parenthood with loving attention to detail, evinced early on when Asato ritualistically brushes his teeth. We learn in flashback that the couple failed to conceive a child and that surgical procedures were considered in the face of Kiyokazu’s wounded male pride. However, an opportunity materialized in the form of Baby Baton, an organization that nurses unwantedly pregnant mothers to birth while locating a family seeking to adopt.

The second hour gives way to the story of Hikari (Aju Makita, enlivening contrivance with actorly assurance and conviction), who goes from reserved, homebound schoolgirl of the middle-class to a life on the big city streets, delivering papers and contending with shady debt collectors (likely yakuza). There’s also a mystery of identity and threats of extortion. To divulge further risks diminishment of intrigue.

Naomi Kawase has been making movies for the better part of thirty years. A former basketball prodigy, she began her career in film with documentaries (mostly 16mm and Super 8) chronicling her life experiences and family; one titled Embracing sees her in search for the biological father who abandoned her in childhood. She has won prizes at Cannes for several fiction films, including her feature debut, Suzaku, about the dissolution of a family following the demise of its patriarch, and The Mourning Forest. She’s also earned critical praise and revilement in equal measure; some characterize her glacially-paced, Shinto-tinged dramas–which often concern the reconciling of nature and humanity; more broadly, the material and the nonmaterial–as impressive, idiosyncratic feats of personal filmmaking, while others figure them hermetic, self-important cures for insomnia. I’ve seen four of her previous features: Suzaku, Shara (my favorite), The Mourning Forest, and Still the Water–Kawase introduced the latter as her “masterpiece” upon its premiere at Cannes in 2014; it received mixed reactions. The themes of loss and grief run through all four films, while parental separation/death and teenage romance manifest in three.

On the surface, True Mothers is not characteristic of those other works. It’s far more conventional in regards to rhythm and narrative delivery. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to watch Kawase smuggle her preoccupations into an audience-friendly melodrama. Often, she’ll integrate nature into scenes of quotidian detail or those set in exterior spaces, like a tree framed against a building, Satako watering her houseplants, or Hikari strolling amid cherry blossoms in bloom. My favorite of these gestures finds her staging a key birth as an offscreen event, letting it be heard over an image of the full moon at night, analogizing the lunar cycle to that of human life. In the film’s most pacific passage, a pregnant Hikari journeys to Baby Baton’s island-based headquarters near Hiroshima, where she’ll be cared for thru delivery. Kawase distinguishes this Edenic space as one punctuated by serenity, female solidarity, and, ultimately, impermanence. A brief deviation toward docufiction aesthetics intimates that, for its maker, this is the true heart of the movie.

For the most part though, Kawase’s trimmings remain just that. A filmmaker like Douglas Sirk was able to address social issues of his day by way of symbols that ran deep into theme, letting his weepies approach movie art through penetrating insight and commentary. (For a comparative example in Japanese Cinema, consider Yasuzo Masumura’s The Blue Sky Maiden or Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu for starters.) Kawase’s enhancements serve to enrich peripheral detail, but without transfiguring the core; her touches garnish the conventions she’s committed to telling. They also work, I think, to magnify the fundamental flaws, specifically that the back-half’s narrative thrust remains predicated on a mystery that’s not terribly mysterious, while ignoring some of the possibilities lurking in the thornier implications.

The film’s title refers to the idea that those we call our mothers go beyond those of biological relation. Naturally, this is the key emotional crux of the movie, and pays off, gracefully, in a stirring climactic gesture of reunion and forgiveness. That the idea gets bogged down in lurid incident and zigzagging narration–the latter seeming to exist solely for reasons of trajectorial complication as opposed to generating narrative complexity–makes the mind wonder to what heights the movie might have soared had it come to the fore and been enhanced. For the achievement of great melodrama is found in a truly felt human core.