Film reviews: True Mothers; Steelers: The World’s First Gay Rugby Club – The Times

True Mothers
Curzon Home Cinema
No certificate, 140min
★★★

Engaging drama comes framed in weak melodrama in this Japanese film. Even the inner story has a few soapy touches, but it’s animated by a quiet, credible performance from the young actress Aju Makita, playing a 14-year-old girl who gives a baby up for adoption and then finds it hard to resume the steady middle-class life for which she had been destined. Much less persuasive are the narrative mechanics that reconnect the girl with the couple (Hiromi Nagasaku and Arata Iura) bringing up her child. The film’s director, Naomi Kawase, proved in her 2015 movie Sweet Bean that she could add smoothness and warmth to sentimental contrivances, but she fumbles things here.

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