By Liz Szabo and susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY

Flowers, greeting cards and candy. Those tend to be the big-three gift options on Mother's Day. A few might even splurge on a family brunch.

But Focus Features is hoping those paying homage to Mom this weekend will turn to a less-traditional way to show their devotion: taking her to watch four little lives blossom on the big screen.

MORE: Nine facts about 'Babies'

Babies, whose trailer has been causing outbreaks of goo-goo nirvana since last fall, opens Friday. The unique documentary follows a quartet of infants — three girls and a boy in San Francisco, Tokyo, Namibia and Mongolia— from birth to their first steps. With no narration and minimal dialogue, it offers a rare, unfiltered cinematic experience.

USA TODAY asked a dozen mothers, grandmothers and mothers-to-be — along with one father, just to be fair — in Northern Virginia for their reactions to Babies Most were profoundly moved, others felt enlightened by the cultural differences, and a few questioned the choices made by the movie's makers. But each one experienced an emotional connection to the all-too-brief moments of babyhood captured on camera.

"There is a weird endorphin high from spending 80 minutes in the mind-set of a baby," says Focus chief James Schamus, who is good friends with the creative force behind the film, French comedy icon and producer Alain Chabat. "You cannot script babies. Babies are the most truthful thing you can see."

Viewers are almost immediately plunged into four diverse environments — the open-air communal lifestyle of Africa's Himba tribe, the remote grassy home of yurt-dwelling Mongolian herders, the high-rise bustle of Tokyo's urban sprawl and the new age-y, eco-aware atmosphere of San Francisco.

With no voice-over to explain the action and the camera regularly kept at low angles, Babies shows "what the world is like from a baby's perspective," says Bonnie Young, 40, a stay-at-home mother of three girls, ages 2 to 6. "The babies were really the stars and could carry a whole movie. Everybody else was a supporting character." That includes parents, pets and at least one taunting older sibling.

And, just like the babies, most audiences won't understand every word spoken since there are no subtitles, observes Elizabeth Webber, 29, a scientist who is expecting her first child in July. "But even the babies get the emotions and sounds."

Treasured moments

The opening of two African babies fighting over a plastic bottle, a now-famous sequence thanks to its prominence in the trailer, especially needs no translation. "That is definitely something my brother and I would do," says Esther Rege, 36, a Uganda-born medical technologist and mother of two, ages 2½and 14 months. "I even see it in my daughters as they fight over the same toy."

The small, everyday occurrences that parents treasure touched Edina Veszelovszky, 41, a Hungarian-born neonatologist and mother of three, ages 3 to 13. Watching the African mother as she playfully makes babbling noises with her daughter reminded Veszelovszky of how she interacted with her own girls: "That's when I got goose bumps."

Seeing how quickly each child grew over the course of a year often proved bittersweet for the mothers. "It made me think about the fleeting period of babyhood and especially what a short time it is when they are so helpless," says Rachel Haws, 33, who has a 2-year-old girl and a second child due in July. "I felt a couple times like I was just tearing up. It was this beautiful picture of a really tiny baby. It's natural, and it's gone by really fast."

She is glad she soon will have a chance to relive that special time. "Looking forward to having that experience again with a new baby I don't know is kind of neat," says Haws, a researcher who studies maternal and newborn health in developing countries. "But it is also a reminder that you have to cherish it, because before you realize it, they are 4 or 5 or 6 years old. Or 20."

When freedom reigns

The film underlines that all humans start life pretty much alike. Days are spent exploring, crying, smiling, laughing, breast-feeding, bathing, playing, sleeping and learning to talk, walk and eat solid food — while not chewing on found objects.

After that, Veszelovszky notes, children begin to be "imprinted by their cultures." Babies would have been much different if the children were shown past their first birthdays, she notes.

Or, as Haws puts it, "there's something universal about how we all arrive. And then things change after that."

Many were impressed at how much freedom that children in the Himba village and the steppes of Mongolia had to move about their surroundings. Even if that leads to testing the patience of indulgent cats, dogs and farm animals, teething upon bones and sticks plucked off the ground or roaming outside in the mud without much adult supervision — or even any diapers.

"I loved how those two babies had such an outdoor experience," Young says. "My own worry is, 'Do I get my kids outside enough?' "

With chores to be done and no one to babysit, the Mongolian mom improvises by tethering her son to a bedpost for safekeeping while she milks the cows — a solution that took some mothers aback. In contrast, the babies in San Francisco and Tokyo spend much of their time indoors, whether supervised at home or in structured settings such as parent-child play groups.

The Japanese and American homes are filled with books and educational toys. But Panteha Nazari, 40, an Iranian-born physical therapist and mother of two ages 13 and 9, was delighted to see how the Mongolian boy was simply content to amuse himself by unraveling and chewing on a roll of toilet paper.

"That was my favorite part," Nazari says. "He was just munching away while tied up to the bed. He was so happy that he got what he wanted.

Webber says she "loved how happy and entertained the Mongolian and African babies seemed to be with so little stuff. It was a nice reminder that children don't really need all that, and it made me want to simplify my baby registry."

Stephanie Bello, a 32-year-old mother of a 2-year-old boy expecting her second child in May, says she wonders what the Namibian and Mongolian families in Babies make of overprotective Americans.

"They must think we're crazy, that we're a little too controlled, because of the way that we fuss over our children," says Bello, who stays home with her son. "They're fine. But we constantly step in. If the other siblings are hitting them, or if they are crying, you want to make sure they are OK. You want to stop anything bad from happening to them."

Webber found Babies eased her anxieties as she goes through her first pregnancy.

"For me it was a lesson to let go," says the scientist at the National Institutes of Health. "People always tell you right and wrong. Even as a pregnant woman, you get advice about what you should or shouldn't be doing. And then you see these babies out there eating dirt, feeding animals. It's a sign that they are going to be OK."

Yet certain scenes had the mothers wishing that they could step in and help, such as when the Japanese baby throws a prolonged fit of diva proportions over a toy with no one around to comfort her. Or when the nearly naked Mongolian boy wanders into a field of calves, their hoofs dangerously closing in on him. Or when his mischievous older brother flaps a cloth in his face.

"When you see the cows, you just want to intervene and say, 'No, no, please don't step on that baby!' " Haws says.

Young compares such scenes to observing wildlife in the raw. "It was like watching an Animal Planet movie, where you see the rabbit being attacked by the lion, and the filmmakers don't want to intervene."

A dad's point of view

The father is barely there in the Mongolian portions and males are mostly absent in Namibia, where the men are often away tending cattle. Rege's husband, Fred, 39, who was born in Kenya, would have liked to have seen them more with the babies.

"Even in this country, there are so many negative images of black men in particular, and fatherless homes are a real issue in the African-American community," he says. "They had an opportunity, but they aren't shown."

But in Tokyo and in San Francisco, the dads are very involved with their daughters. "The first word that came to my head was maternal," he says. "Roles have changed a lot when both parents work. They were very loving and nurturing, not just breadwinners or disciplinarians. Frankly, it was very positive."

He also felt the choice of focusing on a traditional African community that eschews modern dress and other trappings might reinforce stereotypes. But that did not keep him from sending the link to the trailer to his sister.

Aniko Venetianer, Veszelovszky's mother-in-law, 69, visiting from Hungary, sums up Babies this way: "Although the cultures are very different, the final result was always the same."

Meanwhile, Melissa Sweeney, 34, a stay-at-home mom of three ages 5, 2 and 8 months, simply says, "It made me glad to have a baby to go home to."