Mom, Is That You?! 2023
Akio Kanzaki’s job as head of human resources is wearing his nerves thinner and thinner. To make matters worse, he’s on the brink of divorce with his wife, and his relationship with his college-student daughter isn’t exactly smooth sailing. One day, he decides to drop in to Tokyo’s old-timey district to visit his mother Fukue. However, things seem a little off. His mother used to be always working with an apron on, but now she’s covered in stylish clothes, looking livelier than ever, and even in love! Akio becomes perplexed, feeling out of place in his own mother’s home, but after encountering kind, warm—and almost nosey—neighbors and a side of his mother he’d never seen before, Akio gradually starts to discover something he had lost sight of.
Review
In old school and, let’s face it, old, Japanese director Yoji Yamada’s Mom, Is That You?! | こんにちは、母さん the filmmaker best known for his gentle, picaresque sketches of ordinary Japanese life via his 48 Tora-san movies strikes again. I’m not slagging Yamada’s age (a clearly robust 92 now), however it does inform his aesthetic and, more importantly, his worldview, neither of which has changed all that much since his first films in the early 1960s. Yamada films have a creepy optimism and a wilful sweetness about them that’s not for everyone, but his characters also have a thread of recognisability. Most of us would advise sad sack salesman Tora-san to just let go of the lovey dovey nonsense, but not Yamada. And despite a detour into samurai drama in the 2000s (The Hidden Blade, The Twilight Samurai, Love and Honor) he went right back to domestic dramedy with the What a Wonderful Family! series in the 2010s.
So Yoji just keeps doing Yoji, and – surprise surprise – Mom, Is That You is one of the most delightful of his recent films, for fans and sceptics alike. And that’s just it: it’s delightful, the perfect description for this kind of trifle. The frothy (on the surface) film follows Akio Kanzaki (Yo Oizumi, Phases of the Moon) through a vaguely defined mid-life crisis. He’s getting a divorce, his university-aged daughter Mai (Mei Nagano) hates him, his job in HR has taken a turn for the grim, and worst of all his widowed, semi-retired mother Fukue (veteran post-war actor Sayuri Yoshinaga, Tora-san’s Lovesick, Kon Ichikawa’s Ohan) has gotten all horned up for the local pastor Naofumi Ogyu (Ran, and Tora-san regular Akira Terao).
