Love Life
Written and Directed by Koji Fukada
Starring Fumino Kimura, Kento Nagayama
Unrated
Runtime: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Opens in Los Angeles August 25

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

Love Life is the latest feature from writer/director Koji Fukada, who has been making films out of Japan for over a decade now. The title, lifted from an Akiko Anno song which plays over the credits, feels like a misnomer. What we’re watching is a study of family life—that it would be full of love is aspirational, and trauma forces our family to wrestle with their ideals.

Jiro (Kento Nagayama) and Taeko (Fumino Kimura) are just about to celebrate their son, Keita’s (Tetta Shimada) recent victory at an Othello tournament. He is still young, and his parents at least feel like they are, too. Taeko bikes through the golden afternoon as if motherhood is no worry.

We see an extended take from the apartment balcony as she pedals through the parking lot: in this moment Love Life invites you in. I haven’t seen our in insignificance as people in urban life’s towering obtrusions treated with such beauty.

The ensuing party, which includes a surprise visit from a pair of karaoke nuns, also ends in Keita’s sudden death. The moment when he slips and falls into an undrained bathtub is jarring, yet matter-of-fact in its treatment. Its placement feels like Love Life’s only genuine weak spot; none of the brilliance that follows can make up for the fact that showing a death always comes off as a bit of a pratfall. The film can’t get away with something like the Hadley patriarch falling down a flight of stairs in Sirk’s Written on the Wind, in which emotions are at a constant fever pitch. Love Life feels no less real, but its tone leans towards understatement.

It’s fitting then that Keita’s biological father, Taeko’s first husband, Park (Atom Sunada), is deaf. We never find out why he left, but he’s been living on the streets ever since; he found out about Keita’s funeral through an Othello forum post. His appearance is another wrench in Jiro and Taeko’s stability.

A child suddenly dead, a disappeared ex-husband suddenly returning: there are many smaller twists along the way. Jiro’s ex-girlfriend Yamazaki (Hirona Yamazaki), whom he was cheating on with Taeko, is still hanging on to the couple’s social circle. Yet when we cut across 180 degrees to reveal the presence of another, there’s little drama involved: the effect is that they were already there. Taeko works in social services, and thus continues to see Park both as supervisor and interpreter. A coworker picks up on their shared history, and is pleased that it will help ease the friction of trying to find work and a place to live. There is no acrimony over a conflict of interest you might expect. Jiro is even a voice of encouragement in this regard.

If I talk about Love Life’s uncannily pleasant tone while still thinking of it as full of melancholy, these two ideas shouldn’t be taken as contradictory. It is specifically Keita’s childish curiosity with which Fukada moves the camera. There is magic in each pan, which reveals beyond thin walls what seems to be a whole new world. Like each person, the places we move between seem to coexist by way of a miracle.

Hideo Yamamoto, who has shot a significant chunk of Takeshi Miike’s films, is behind the camera for this. He works with light and colour to tell the story clearly and simply. A CD hanging outside Jiro and Taeko’s apartment dances in the sunlight when no one’s around. From Jiro’s parents’ balcony at night, out-of-focus city lights look sharp and static, like dots on a map.

The object of Othello, named after Shakespeare’s foundational domestic melodrama, is territory control. Limit your opponent’s options; maintain control of the sides, then take a corner. In Love Life, we witness people at wit’s end, backed up and unsure of what to do. Fukada carves a space for them to continue in their indecision. Seeing Jiro from behind, we see him vent his frustrations to Park. Where do his words go? So often the fear in life is that our actions are meaningless, yet the object here is that meaningless actions like an errant cigarette really will change nothing.

We keep returning to Jiro and Taeko’s apartment out of habit: it seems to change just as much as it doesn’t. Maybe the fact that it doesn’t collapse under its own weight after Keita dies is yet another tragedy. What exactly do you do when the world really does continue turning? Love Life makes such a question feel astonishingly light.