The director of The Mourning Forest returns with another sensitive film, this time about a difficult adoption, yet plot holes prove distracting
The Japanese auteur Naomi Kawase has returned with another of her highly distinctive, tremulously sensitive movies: heartfelt and unhurried, with a tendency to wash the screen in plangent sunlight as the camera looks plaintively up through the branches – and also, a borderline exasperating tendency towards a kind of pass-agg quietism. I have responded variously to this in the past: there was something underpowered in her sucrose drama Sweet Bean but real beauty in other films, such as her award-winning The Mourning Forest. And there is a sustained emotional seriousness in this movie, with committed performances.
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