Japanese photographer, lecturer, writer and filmmaker Naomi Kawase has been a regular on the international film festival circuit for more than two decades, from her feature debut in 1997, Suzaku, after several acclaimed documentary shorts, a form she returns to with regularity. True Mothers, based on the novel of the same name by Mizuki Tsujimura, is her tenth feature, following such award-winners as her Cannes Grand Prix winner Mogari No Mori / The Mourning Forest (’07), Futatsume No Mado / Still The Water (’14) and An / Sweet Bean (’15), alongside 2018’s Vision, starring Juliette Binoche, which should have introduced Kawase to a wider European audience.

Although the story is ostensibly the story of the Kuriharas who, unable to have children, adopt a baby, naming him Asato, and meeting the young mother, Hikari, still a schoolgirl,, but are faced with a problem when, several years later when Asato is at kindergarten a seemingly violent incident makes them wonder about the young child’s real personality, then being contacted by someone claiming to be Hikari, suggesting she wants him back and threatening to reveal Asano’s real background unless she is paid, and although Tsujimura, the writer of the original novel, is better known for her mysteries, this is a story of adoption told from two viewpoints, that of the the family and that of Hikari in the years between the birth and the present day, and although in the original work the identity of the caller claiming to be the boy’s mother is not revealed until much later on. Instead Kawase establishes the two plot strands early on, the worries of Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaku - Closed Diary / Rebirth) and Kiyokazu (Arata Iura - 20th Century Boys series / The Last Zatochi) about their adopted son, and the life of his biological mother, Hikari (Aju Makita - The Cat In Their Arms), after the child’s birth, and Nawase isn’t shy of very cleverly manipulating the audience, the scene of the prospective parents meeting Hikari in the adoption office, while her own parents wait in the background, wreathed in shame, is certainly powerful, and if the complex emotional familial narrative reminds one of a Hirokazu Kore-eda film, both Arata Iura and Aju Makita are both Kore-eda regulars.

Running nearly two hours and twenty minutes, the film is more concerned with the characters rather than the situation, specifically how Hiraki ended up in the situation she found herself in, and how almost everybody she trusted, from her lover, Takumi (Taketo Tanaka - Kamen Rider Giam), to the adoption agency let her down in some way, and how she believed the only way to continue was to essentially start again, leaving her home and trying to make a new life for herself, but finding herself unable to abandon her child completely.

Described by Screen Daily as ‘An elegant, absorbing piece of storytelling’, The San Francisco Chronicle went into a little more detail, believing ‘Naomi Kawase’s films don’t hammer toward arbitrary plot points but flow like water, so True Mothers doesn’t unfold like a Hollywood blockbuster, or indeed, even most arthouse films. It courses along softly and confidently, with unexpected ebbs and estuaries’. But the running time was an issue with some, Movie Nation saying the film ‘ … is a melodrama with 90 minutes of story awash in 139 minutes of movie. Kawase holds our interest by letting us see the unexpressed pain of characters generally too well-mannered to express loss, shock, outrage and resentment out loud’, The Hollywood Reporter believing ‘It is, at least in its closing hour, a moving dramatization of maternal feelings’. The Austin Chronicle noted ‘The longer it goes, the more True Mothers gets weighed down by its melodrama. Kawase is just hopeful and soft enough to keep her film glowing, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing, and is a bit frustrating with its blatant red herrings’. The New York Times observed ‘Only a mountain couldn’t be moved by True Mothers - but like Asato’s parentage, the sources of that effect are complex. From one angle, [film] is sensitive and layered. From another, the tricks it plays with perspective constitute an all-too-calculated ploy for tears’.