CIFF 2020: True Mothers
ciff 2020Naomi Kawase's newest feature, True Mothers, explores the topic of motherhood through a young couple who adopts a child in modern day Japan. The couple cares for the child but, one day, a girl named Hikari (Aju Makita) shows up at their door claiming to be the child's biological mother and wants him back. The film, from a plot perspective, finds legitimate depth but with an over bloated screenplay and general lack of urgency, True Mothers struggles to make the most of these moments and create a captivating thesis.
The main flaw within the film can be felt in the first 90-minutes of its runtime. True Mothers is a film with natural emotional stakes: the emotions of a young woman wanting to become a mother and the stress of the adoption process carries an almost automatic weight that gives the film substance right away. Yet True Mothers does very little to hook the audience into caring about these characters or their situation. The fly on the wall approach of filmmaking, dropping audiences into a situation with little context or setup, is very hit or miss — within True Mothers, it feels like a miss. Without any reason to care about these characters or engage with the drama, the film largely feels boring and uninteresting. The emotional depth on display is more something passively observed than actively engaged with. It certainly doesn't help that the film carries a 140-minute runtime which largely is spent in a passive meditative tone. The film desperately needed either a hook to engage the audience into the world so the meditative and quiet approach to filmmaking could be greatly appreciated or a sense of urgency in the plot to make the plot move quicker. Ultimately, there is no reason that this story couldn't be told in a drastically shorter runtime, with the quieter more passive approach adding very little thematically.
Whilst the film overall feels like white noise, it would be a disservice to the film to ignore where it does work. The lead performance from Hiromi Nagasaku standing out as genuine and impressive, only to then be rivaled by Aju Makita in her supporting role. Both these performances, along with the rest of the film, stand out as quiet and thoughtful but due to their emotional weight, work much better. These two bring the best scenes of the film where the nuanced conversation and deeper emotional weight of the plot is felt. It is impossible to say that True Mothers is an empty film, because clearly it is not; there is a backbone of genuine emotional weight but the screenplay ultimately fails the film.
Whilst True Mothers is far from a terrible film, it also is hard to recommend. Even with certain scenes truly shining, the overall 140-minute viewing experience is one that is hard to sit through. At times, it feels boring and forgettable — which is not only frustrating in general but is only further irritating due to the clear potential that the film has.
