Film Review: What Is Mother?

Wen / Liu Ying

Japanese director Naomi Hasee, who is good at making emotional plays, likes to focus on women. These women, regardless of their age and social class, are showing their own difficulties and charm in front of her camera《 Dawn is coming "is his latest work. In 2020, it has been shortlisted in Cannes, Toronto, St. Sebastian and other important film festivals, which shows the audience's recognition of the work. The reason is that the director shows his sympathy for the female individual vividly in this 140 minute story.

"Dawn is coming" is called true mothers in English, which is translated as "real mothers". Director Naomi Hasee made a "showthrough" in the title of the film, announcing to the audience that the protagonist of the story is more than one woman. The film starts from the black field. After a short breath of childbirth, the female voice gently calls "Hello, little bit". Immediately, the film will focus on the Li Yuan couple's family. As the middle class, they live a delicate life, and their six-year-old son is also cute and cute. The first turning point in the plot is a phone call from a kindergarten teacher claiming that their son pushed a classmate off the scaffold and injured the latter. After a burst of shock and sadness, the relationship between Li Yuan and his son can also be revealed in the flashback: it turns out that the son is not their own. Li Yuan and his wife, who had been married for many years, were unable to have children because of their lack of congenital conditions. By chance, I learned that the public welfare organization specialized in adoption matching established a family of three with their help.

Naomi Hasee uses one-third of the length of the film to build the context of this family. Just when the audience thought that the film would move towards discussing the relationship between foster parents and children, the story suddenly changed and used another phone call to let the child's biological mother film Cang Guang appear in the camera. Compared with the carefree life of Li Yuan and his wife, the image of Ka Cang Guang undoubtedly represents another class - her past is full of pain, and her present is hopeless. She suggested that she wanted to return the child, otherwise Li Yuan and his wife would have to pay. This unreasonable request is a great surprise. Her sudden appearance is a sudden attack on the protagonist. Just as the audience in front of the screen is eager to start the moral trial, Naomi Hasee suddenly jumps out of the narrative logic of "either or" and arranges a complete flashback for the role of katurai.

The story of katangguang starts with her falling in love, and the unexpected pregnancy has escalated the conflicts in her original family. She was sent by her parents to a public welfare organization founded by Jianjian, waiting for the end of her long pregnancy. In her maternity home in Hiroshima, she felt for the first time the beauty of mutual assistance and love among women. However, the reality is still quite cruel to her. After the child was sent away, she was supposed to return to normal life, but she still faced the oppression of her family, her unsatisfactory work and the betrayal of her new friends. Finally, kakanguang has changed from a lovely high school girl to a disheartened social idle person. In this long flashback, Naomi Hasee gives her enough gaze in a weak position - close-up shot always shows the character's emotion, and the gentle light quietly gives her certain dignity in the dark. In the section of showing the place of labor, the director uses the documentary shooting technique, which is more natural and simple than other parts of the film.

It was not until then that we understood that the plural mother in the English title refers to the young girl who was pregnant in October, Ms. Li Yuan, who took over the rod of rearing, and a lady who tried to provide help to the ignorant and infertile families who were pregnant unexpectedly. With a popular drama like story with some dog blood at first glance, Naomi Hasee completed the multi-dimensional shaping of the image of contemporary mother. What's valuable is that although some paragraphs have the problem of over lyricism, the director's starting point is still to give women of different classes and different situations the greatest recognition, and thus there is the warmth of reconciliation between the two mothers at the end of the film. Although the flashback processing method makes the film seem a little lengthy, perhaps this is the best way that the director has found and can calmly trace the psychological course of several mothers.