“To become a mother, I must move past sanity” the maternal figure at the centre of Takeshi Kushida’s My Mother’s Eyes (マイマザーズアイズ) eventually exclaims, but what exactly are the limits of the parental sacrifice? Should a parent necessarily have to give themselves over body and soul to the next generation leaving nothing of and for themselves, and should the child accept that sacrifice or not considering that it may, in turn, rob them of their own individuality?
Hitomi, whose name ironically sounds like the word for the pupil of the eye though the kanji it uses are those of “virtuous beauty”, clearly feels some level of resentment towards her daughter Eri despite the superficial closeness of their relationship which sees the teenage daughter still cuddling up to her mother in the night. Once a promising cellist herself, Hitomi now makes her living as a teacher and claims that she now enjoys writing songs for Eri to play more than playing herself. Yet it seems Eri too may be rebelling against the necessity of playing the notes her mother has set down for her. “Listen very carefully to the music your partner makes,” Hitomi gently advises on noticing Eri veering off script while rehearsing for a duet she asked her mother to play, “then we can become one piece of music together.”
This sense of reintegration or inseparability seems to be a longed-for quality though for Hitomi perhaps it amounts to an erasure as if she sought to bring her daughter into herself so that she might be free to pursue the career in music denied her by the demands of raising a child alone. Eri, meanwhile, yearns for acceptance, countering her mother’s resentment with her own revealing that even if she had not detected it in her mother’s eyes she clearly felt it in her music in the continual duel which being fought between them. Something Hitomi had kept from her is that she was losing her sight, a sudden entrance of darkness following Eri’s attempt to broach the subject of maternal rejection while driving along a tunnel clearly warning of dangerous curves ahead. The accident leaves Eri paralysed from the neck down, and Hitomi forced to face the reality of her fading sight.
After contacting a blogger who’d previously written about an experimental treatment but was ominously warned off writing any more, Hitomi is whisked away to a Western-style mansion in the countryside occupied by a man scientist and his creepily robotic son, Satoshi. The treatment comes in the form of a high-tech contact lens which bounces additional light to Hitomi’s fading retinas that can be adjusted via smartphone app through which everything Hitomi sees can be observed by others. As a means of making amends, she agrees to give her life over to the bedridden Eri who sees through her eyes via virtual reality headset and speaks words for Hitomi to repeat just as she had written notes for Eri to play.
But Hitomi is in other ways free to guide her, transgressively straying into a sexual relationship with the decidedly odd Satoshi who like his father has an odd habit of just appearing out of nowhere or at any rate swiftly like a bird swooping down to land. Hitomi strokes his back like she were playing a playing a cello, making music to communicate to whom remains unclear. Satoshi’s father later says that music was his “light” too as his own sight failed though it seems he no longer plays, music like light to Hitomi, had become painful and he had come to appreciate only “haunting” melodies. Just Eri has taken control of Hitomi, Satoshi’s father is still controlling him partly through the lenses and partly through mysterious tranquilliser pills that might explain his otherwise uncanny manner.
The relationships between them begin to blur in the incestuous cross currents in which Eri succumb to a phantom pregnancy as her mother becomes a surrogate to child that is somehow hers, Satoshi’s, and his father’s though he later tries to assume control of it roundly telling Hitomi she lacks maternal devotion and is unfit to raise a raise. Her battle is as much to reclaim her maternity as it is to reclaim herself while entering a kind of symbiosis with her daughter that included a notion of duplication and continuity. If every son must kill his father, then perhaps giving birth is paradoxically a cure for motherhood. Asking a series of questions about the use and misuse of such technology that infringes not only on a sense of reality but also the security of the self, Kishida channels a sense of anxious eeriness but ends at least on a note of harmony albeit “haunting” in its nature.
Trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 