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Japan · 2020
2h 20m
Director Naomi Kawase
Starring Hiromi Nagasaku, Arata Iura, Aju Makita, Reo Satou
Genre Drama
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Kiyokazu and Satoko are a married couple whose painful experiences with fertility treatment leads them to adoption. Six years later, the couple live happily with their adopted son, Asato. However, chaos ensues when Hakari, Asato's birth mother, reemerges and is intent on extorting them for cash.
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
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, True Mothers is sensitive and layered. From another, the tricks it plays with perspective constitute an all-too-calculated ploy for tears.
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
It is, at least in its closing hour, a moving dramatization of maternal feelings.
San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson
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.
Austin Chronicle by Jenny Nulf
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.
Adapting Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel of the same name helps impose more of a narrative framework than is typically found in Kawase’s oeuvre, although the film’s mix of genres — from marital drama to teen romance to social commentary — don’t gel.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
There is a sustained emotional seriousness in this movie, with committed performances.
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
In Kawase’s delicate hands, however, it breathes with an everyday poignancy.
True Mothers 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 film shimmers with beauty and sadness despite its length, and the Japanese director’s background as both a photographer and a documentary filmmaker brings a gossamer naturalism to this realistic tale about a young woman’s regrets over abandoning her child years after the fact.
An elegant, absorbing piece of storytelling.
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