Naomi Kawase's "True Mothers”: Japan’s Superb Entry for the Academy Award

This review contains plot spoilers

At the outset “True Mothers” seems almost a cliché: a happy couple with an adopted child get an unexpected jolt when his desperate birth mother suddenly appears.  Fortunately, nothing is as it appears in Naomi Kawase’s masterful film, and the great pleasure of watching is its uncertainty. What begins as the story of a m…