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Late into Kosai Sekine’s maternal mystery Stay Mum (かくしごと. Kakushigoto), a doctor describes the behaviour of an old man living with dementia as a “convenient delusion” and later remarks forgetting is a kind of salvation that liberates him from what was apparently a very stressful life of repression and properness. Yet to the heroine there’s something very unfair about someone who has hurt her very deeply being allowed to just forget all about it while she has to on carrying the legacy of his unkindness along her own grief and pain.
Ironically enough, she finds herself caught in the middle as a mother and a daughter after taking in a little boy her friend accidentally ran over who appears to have extensive scars and bruising that suggest he has been mistreated by his birth family for some time. The boy also claims to have lost his memory, leading Chisako (Anne Watanabe) to fill in the blanks for him. She gives him a name, Takumi, and tells him that he is her son intending to raise the boy covertly while temporarily stying in her rural hometown to care for her estranged father after he was found wandering around in a state of undress.
Even Takumi realises the irony of Chisako’s father Ko (Eiji Okada) falling further into a state of forgetting just as he is learning to “remember” thanks to the memories Chisako imparts to him in their fictional shared history. The film’s English title is a kind pun playing the fact that everyone involved must “stay mum” in order to maintain this delusion of family life while also hinting Chisako’s desire to reclaim her maternity having lost a child of her own. The Japanese title more literally translates as “that which is hidden” while the novel that it’s based on is titled the more direct “lie” though of course it leaves ambiguous to which lie it is referring. But as the doctor had said, it becomes a “convenient delusion” for everyone which grants them a kind of peace and serenity that allows them to reclaim exactly what they wanted out of life but perhaps could not get in any other way.
But of course, it can’t last and at the same time also delays a final confrontation with the reality that would truly allow them to move forward. Someone later accuses Chisako of brainwashing Takumi, essentially kidnapping him while forcing him to play the role of her son as if she were simply mentally disturbed and desperate to overcome her grief rather than genuinely concerned and morally outraged by the idea of allowing a boy who shows clear signs of abuse to return to a home in which he will continue to be mistreated. But at the same time, she struggles to relate to her father and behaves towards him in ways which to Takumi may seem abusive, shouting at and at one point slapping him after a particularly unkind remark. Her inability to control herself further compounds her sense of failure as both mother and daughter, still carrying an internalised sense of inadequacy because of her father’s toxic parenting while in the midst of forgetting he is perhaps still able to perceive the mistakes he made that cost him a functioning relationship with his daughter.
Ko spends his days crafting statues of the goddess of mercy as if begging for atonement all while unable to recall the face he wished to give her. The irony is that as the doctor said, forgetting allows him to drop his guard and to remember the costs of the way he lived his life. As Chisako counters there are also things which shouldn’t be forgotten no matter how painful they may be to remember, along with those which cannot really be forgiven, though the act of wilful forgetfulness does perhaps provide a salve for the wounds of the past. Though at times overly contrived and strikingly predictable, Sekine’s empathetic contemplation of the emotional truths behind the bonds of parents and their children ends in a violent confrontation with corrupted parenthood but equally in a gesture of mutual salvation which ironically depends entirely on the willingness to speak the truth both emotional and literal.
Stay Mum screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival
Original trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 