Even the tightest of marriages can be strained and shattered with the death of a child. For the handsome and healthy Japanese couple Taeko and Jiro, this tragedy shows all the fault lines that were already in their young relationship, before the ghosts of both partners’ pasts appeared. Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” unabashedly embraces melodramatic innovations in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much through social prejudices as through personal demons; She does so only with such dull, polite precaution that his affection never becomes stirred. As such, this accepted but lengthy pic finds the Japanese writer and director still struggling to get back into shape for his 2016 Cannes award-winning film Harmonium.
This movie was an exercise in color contrast and confusing conflict, with a trajectory of dark-blood comedy running through intensely tragic events. “Love Life”, on the other hand, is a serious affair largely without humor: while it’s impossible not to be moved on some level by the infernal plight of its characters, the prevailing tone here leans toward the weak. Respectable performances and assured, restrained craftsmanship lead the film to be seen in satisfactory enough accuracy, but entry into the Venice competition may not have the effect necessary to secure a wide distribution of artistic premises.
The opening scenes establish an early sense of local calm and lackluster emotional distance that characterizes the relationships between Taiko (Fumino Kimura) and Jiro (Kento Nagayama) in the elegant little apartment they share in a Japanese seaside town. Their routines tend to align with six-year-old Keita (Tita Shimada), the brilliant and adorable son of Taika from a previous relationship: although Jiro is a gentle father to the boy, the matter of his paternalism seems like another territorial division between the couples who don’t share their lives fully.
Jiro Makoto’s parents (Tomoru Taguchi) and Aki (Misuzu Kano) live in the same building, but that’s also not the seemingly comfortable arrangement: Makoto never consents to his son’s marriage to a divorced mother, and boundaries of amicability begin to emerge over the course of the family’s birthday party who initiates actions. The day will turn much worse, however, when Keita suddenly dies in a totally conceivable home accident – an accident that takes place, only in part, in the space of a single still shot framed wisely by Fukada and DP Hideo Yamamoto. Within a few minutes, the most obligating family bond is severed, instantly fading out the living and sad.
Fukada captures the immediate aftermath of the event with a trustworthy and appropriate delicacy: “Love Life” is best at negotiating tense silences, not quite simple, as when Jiro tries to sense whether or not to take off the party decorations that are now by The error marks Keita’s death, or Taiko’s shocked attempt to select images for the memorial slideshow. Things take a less convincing turn with the arrival of deaf ex-Korean Park (Atom Sunada) from Taiko, who crashes the funeral to hit her in the face.
It’s a rare abrasive act in a film of quiet words and deeds. It also never quite feels right, either right now or as we learn more about the relationship and feud between Taeko and Park, who has been homeless for quite some time. Treating his ordeal honestly turns into a distraction for Taeko from her mourning, while Jiro, in a somewhat asymmetric turn of events, rekindles his acquaintance with one of his former friends. (Nagayama always hovering over what is shy of his partner’s feelings, and never fully emphasizing his feelings, subtly writes the trickiest role here.) While Kimura and Sunada give decent solo performances, they never convince us that Taeko and Park once shared a connection. Spirit.
This seems less intentional than the figurative glass wall separating Taiko and Jiro – which gives at least the slightly paler love triangle that produces a jolt of uncertainty. No pair of characters exactly appeared on the same page until the elegantly continuous closing shot of the film, with two people walking through suburban streets and squares before disappearing into the middle distance, the glamorous strains of Akiko Yano’s English song “Love Life” standing up for their distant inaudible dialogue “No matter the distance between us, nothing can stop me from loving you,” she sings—if Fukada is sometimes such a lyrical movie, it nonetheless suggests that love here may be more complex and conditional than that.
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