True Mothers (Naomi Kawase, 2020) (Patreon)

I know the conventional wisdom on True Mothers is that it's another Kawase dud. But I beg to differ. It's obviously not perfect. It's the most plot-driven film Kawase has made thus far, and there are moments where she lets slip that she isn't entirely conversant with this kind of filmmaking. In particular, major events are set up by random, implausible coincidence. Is this true of the source novel? I don't know, but having the childless couple, Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaku) and Kiyokazu (Arata Iura), flipping through TV channels in their hotel room looking for a football game and just happening upon a news special about adoption, is pretty suspect. 

On the other hand, I think that Kawase getting out of her own head and having to contend with someone else's ideas was clarifying. Much as I felt about Josephine Decker's Shirley, True Mothers retains the best of Kawase's formal instincts while grounding them in more conventional story values. I'm fairly certain that the bifurcated structure, with the first half focused on the adopting couple and the second half on birth mother Hikari (Aju Makita), was lifted directly from the novel. But Kawase makes the most of it, using subtle differences in tone and emphasis to differentiate the two parts. The first half feels very much like Kore-eda, which feels utterly appropriate; the second half is skittish and dynamic, like a YA adaptation.

It's also worth noting that Kawase's Shintoist animism is much less heavy-handed here than in her recent original scripts (especially Vision, which was pretty awful). True Mothers is really just an emotionally resonant mainstream film, more than willing to tug at the heartstrings. And yet, Kawase bathes the film in light, displaying an intensity of image that sets it apart from its conventional trappings. The comfortable lives of the adoptive couple, the Kuriharas, are distinguished from Hikari's bleak reality by something as simple as the presence or absence of trees, and although this is a Kawase trademark, she deploys it quite unobtrusively here.

So while I wouldn't make any grand claims for True Mothers, I feel that it is fairly strong work overall, and while I may be biased by the fact that, over the past five or so years, I've developed a clearer sense of where Kawase is coming from as an artist, I also think that she has grown quite a lot. The faith that Fremaux and the other doyennes of Cannes have placed in her over the years seems a lot less misplaced than it once did. (Sorrentino still sucks tho.)