Mr. and Mrs. Kurihara are an ordinary Japanese family.
His father works outside the home, his mother works as a stay-at-home wife, and a cute kindergarten boy, Chao Dou.
The family is happy every day, with no worries about food and clothing. Only, a sudden phone call broke the calm.
The kindergarten teacher said that when Chaodou was playing with his classmate XiaoQiong on the climbing frame, he pushed Xiaoqiu off the top and sprained his ankle.
Mrs. Kurihara rushed to the kindergarten, and instead of blaming Asagiri, she asked him very seriously, Did you really push it?
Chao Dou shook his head.
Seeing her son deny it, Mrs. Kurihara gave 100% trust.
However, in the eyes of the teacher and Kokyu's parents, the Kurihara family should give compensation and apologize, with a strong and aggressive attitude.
Under this high pressure, Asagiri was very confused, and he asked his mother with trepidation whether he had really done something wrong and whether he needed to apologize.
In the seemingly simple and unworthy things, we see the struggle and caution of a mother, and her seriousness and responsibility for raising her children.
Fortunately, in the end, Xiao Qiong himself admitted that it was actually he who had wronged ChaoDou, and it was he who jumped from the climbing frame.
Mrs. Kurihara breathed a sigh of relief: "How can I question my own children?" ”
At this point, the camera turns, and we learn the truth of the matter.
It turned out that Asagiri was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Kurihara, because Mr. Kurihara suffered from azoospermia, and the two could not have their own children.
One person's physical problems have also become the pressure of another person, and guilt and guilt have put the marriage in jeopardy.
By chance, the two learned of the existence of an NGO (non-profit organization) "Baby Baton", and they moved the idea of adoption.
"Baby Baton" was founded by Ms. Asami, a very great woman.
She started the organization with the idea of getting people who aren't ready to become parents to give their newborn children to people who for some reason can't have one.
Baby Baton has a very strict set of adoption criteria, one of which is that the parents of the adoptive family must bring their own children, and one of the parents must resign and devote themselves to raising the child.
These hard and fast regulations are exempt from discussion once they are not met.
And this organization also has a philosophy: not to let parents choose their children, but to let children choose their parents .
This turns our traditional ideas upside down.
Many times, parents feel that they have raised us, and we are their appendages and tools.
For example, Tian Yulan, played by Jiang Xin in "Little Shede", is a parent who is simply suffocating.
Adoptive parents cannot decide the gender of their children, but can only passively accept and give their all.
And those girls who can't raise their children themselves for various reasons can wait for childbirth on the island provided by "Baby Baton" until they give birth and restart their lives.
Therefore, the children here knew from the beginning that they were adopted, and Chaodou learned all this from his mother at a very young age.
He had three mothers, One was Mrs. Kurihara, who raised him; one was the Hiroshima mother who gave birth to him; and the other was The Asami Lady who brought him from his Hiroshima mother to her adoptive mother.
Asagiri's birth mother, Hiroshima's mother, Komitsu, was only a fourteen-year-old junior high school student when she was pregnant with him.
Hikari is very beautiful, she was born in Nara, grew up in Nara, and fell in love in Nara.
Even, Xiao Guang's appearance is like a very agile deer, with big eyes and watery eyes, very beautiful.
A picturesque place in Nara.
Here, Xiao Guang falls in love with a boy.
They run together, walk together under those old trees, kiss as the cherry blossoms fall, and applaud love at sunset.
What's wrong with that? Is it just because two people are only 14 years old that this love and experience is dirty and shameful?
Many people may not be able to obtain such pure, true love in their lifetime.
Then, Xiao Guang became pregnant.
She was expelled, hidden by her family as a curse, sent to Baby Baton, and finally handed over to the Kuriharas after taking a look at the child.
Yes, as the second daughter in the family, the most her mother said to her was to study hard and be admitted to her sister's university in the future.
She was not asked, whether she was afraid, whether she was helpless, whether she regretted it, whether she was physically uncomfortable, whether her mother was always repeating her studies, and the college entrance examination for the coming year.
What is even more ridiculous is that the mother actually told her relatives about the pregnancy.
You see, the so-called pain and dignity of young girls are, in the eyes of some parents, but jokes and talking points.
Unable to stand it all, she ran away from home.
Throughout the process, Xiaoguang saw too many girls who were abandoned by their families and parents.
At a young age when they can no longer be young, because of the lack of parents, they enter the customs industry, they go down a crooked road, then they get pregnant, and finally they lose their children.
Some girls have never been able to celebrate a birthday at home, let alone eat cake.
Xiao Guang, who left home, suffered a lot, fell into embarrassment, no longer like a flexible deer, but like a bad girl.
Hikari returns to Hiroshima to find Ms. Asami, who asks her why she started Baby Baton.
She said she used to be a nurse and had seen too many sad mothers. She couldn't have children and wanted to have her own.
"I feel like I have a lot of kids and that makes me feel satisfied."
At this time, the sun sprinkled on Aunt Asami's face, so gentle, like the sea on a summer evening, vast and inclusive.
Aunt Asami is sick and Baby Baton is about to close, and she waits calmly for her own death, like a virgin, nursing the children for the rest of her life.
"Thank you, good luck, and tell others our story."
After Asami said this, the shadow of a girl holding a camera appeared on the grass in the sun.
This shadow is "Naomi Kawase", and the story just now comes from the film "Morning Dawn Is Coming" directed by her.
"The Dawn Is Coming" was completed in 2020, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, and was unsurprisingly selected for Cannes.
Director Naomi Kawase is known as "the first sister of contemporary Japanese cinema".
Since her feature-length debut suzaku won the Golden Camera Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, Naomi Kawase has become a banner for Japanese films, especially Japanese female directors.
Since the beginning of the film, she has always put the core of the film on the family, and most of these families live in the ancient capital of Nara, and they are more or less mutilated and unsatisfactory.
This is because Kawase's parents divorced from childhood, and his maternal grandparents were also divorced. Thanks to the love of her grandparents, she had relatively good teenage memories in Nara City.
Even so, the regret and harm caused by the family cannot be erased, so Kawase can only reflect her private life experience through the theme of the movie, and all kinds of broken families imply her resentment.
If the past is too painful for us to look at, the camera's gaze is like soft hands, allowing us to face the past.
For example, the father in "Suzaku of Meng" abandons his wife and daughter and does not say goodbye.
The female nurse of "Funeral Forest" lost her son in an accident and the marriage was broken.
The stepfather in "The Two Trees of Saro" and the younger brother Jun, who endures the fear of his brother's disappearance.
In my opinion, "The Dawn Is Coming" may be Naomi Kawase's best and most sincere work in recent years, and it is also the most recent work with her childhood experience.
Many times, sincerity and tangible pain are the most successful places for a movie, such as "Hello, Li Huanying" directed by Jia Ling at the beginning of the year, and "The Morning Dawn Is Coming" is the same.
"The Morning Dawn Is Coming" is also a story about a mother.
The English name of "The Morning Dawn is Coming" is Ture mother.
What is a Ture mother?
It's not about procreation, it's about parenting, it's about one thing: love.
As long as she truly loves her child, then she is the mother of the child.
As long as she only treats her child as an appendage, whether she is born or raised, she cannot be regarded as a mother.
Parentality does not equal private ownership.
There are many kinds of mothers in the film.
Some people want to send their children out and don't want to hold them; some people only care about their children's grades and learning, and they don't care about their children's dignity and emotions; some people have never had children, but they have many children.
Xiao Guang's mother gave birth to her and raised her, but failed to protect her, did not teach her how to deal with her feelings, how to become a qualified mother.
And all this was taught to her by Aunt Asami.
In a difficult life, a mother's love for her child should be the softest and most beautiful.
From the forest of Nara, to the sea of Hiroshima, to the place where Asagiri is located, all of it is just looking for the original thing: as a mother, she wants to see her child.
In the end she got her wish.
Li Yuan's mother took Chaodou's hand and brought him to Xiao Guang.
"The Morning Dawn is Coming" discusses the proposition that "the concept of the family - the power of blood - it is better to be born than to be raised", but due to the characteristics of Naomi Kawase herself, the film is pushed into a grand space.
In the film, there are many scenes of the sea, and the director borrows the mouth of Asahi and says, "In fact, there is only one sea."
Yes, there is only one sea, and there is only one kind of mother, and that is the mother who has invested infinite love in her children.
In addition to the sea, there are still many scenes of nature in the film, which has a feeling of Terrance Malik's "Tree of Life".
And this is what Naomi Kawase has always had.
From the early years of documentaries, her lens often focused on the surrounding monsoons, and later maintained this feature in the feature films, such as the flood in "Funeral Forest", the heavy rain in "Sharo Twin Trees", and "Suzaku of Meng", thus leading the film to a "pre-language" environment and leaving emotions for the audience to understand.
Hozoku once commented that Japanese directors are good at "making poetic depictions of sentimental or maternal love, and blending these things with the lyrical elements of nature such as mountain scenery, according to which their delicate sensibility is honed." ”
Naomi Kawase is like that.
Under the seemingly chaotic images, "The Morning Dawn Is Coming" buries a woman's understanding of the word "mother", and this realization is based on her hatred and hard work.
The morning sun is coming, remember I love you, please don't erase me from your mind.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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