True Mothers review – intermittently engaging melodrama

Having won the Caméra d’Or (for best first film) back in 1997, Naomi Kawase is now something of a Cannes mainstay. Her films Sweet Bean and Still Water were considered favourites to win the Palme, while the Japanese director has stated her ambition to one day snag the top prize.

Distributors in the UK have been less optimistic about the prospects of her occasionally tedious domestic dramas; it’s only following a recent MUBI retrospective that she appears to be finding a wider English-speaking audience. Her latest, the Venice-competing True Mothers, isn't exactly poised to be the next Shoplifters, reaching as it does for grand emotions and swooning social gestures but only intermittently hitting its stride.

After going through a lengthy adoption process, Kiyokazu Kurihara (Arata Iura) and Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaku) enjoy six years of domestic bliss with their son Asato. In her usual form, Kawase captures a rarified vision of Japan: sunlight thinly peeking through blossom trees to set the scene. Having watched their drawn-out struggle to adopt, witnessing this middle class existence is cathartic; the stuff of picture books, tourist guide books, and picturesque Studio Ghibli films.

Then, as it should in any great melodrama, a phone call disrupts everything. Asato’s birth mother Hikari Katakura (Aju Makita), begging for her child back, agrees to settle for a payout. Kiyokazu and Satoko, who met Hikari when she was a young teenager, are shocked when she turns up, aggressive and punkish. Surely, the couple think, this can’t really be their son’s birth mother? If not, then who is she?

The central conflict is appropriately difficult, but feels stretched at 140 minutes. The cruelty of modern society’s traps has been tackled before, notably in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Like Father, Like Son. As in that film, class becomes a central barometer by which a child’s manners are judged. Changing mores in Japan are slyly hinted at as we see the different ways that young people are treated across the last 20 years. But Kawase is apparently less interested in social dilemma than by motherhood as a conduit for communion with nature.

Indeed, Kawase is a devout Shintoist, and it is at times fascinating to see how those traditions influence her filmmaking choices. Accord between people and nature is an aesthetic state that filmmakers as culturally distinct as Terrence Malick, Youssef Chahine, and Chloé Zhao have aimed to represent. While Kawase achieves a certain harmony here, it is mostly through placid drama. As she disrupts the story’s potential mysteries by delivering expository flashbacks, the opportunity to bask in her poetry seems to be the order of the day.

But, for the less dedicated, her filmmaking lacks rigour. Handheld close ups of hands and frames packed with luscious potted plants should feel transcendent, but Kawase cuts between images based on the matter of her feeling, not the needs of the characters. And despite these flashbacks, the character dynamics never seem to change. This might be her most accessible film, but only, perhaps, because Kawase is delivering more of the same.

True Mothers is now available on Curzon Home Cinema.