Love Life: A complex film about family disharmony that will repay rewatching

Koji Fukada, just cresting middle-age, has emerged as the latest in a long, fecund line of humanist Japanese filmmakers. Striking events happen in pictures such as Harmonium and A Girl Missing, but the real drama is crackling behind the eyes of often troubled characters. The most shocking moment here comes at the funeral of a child. The dead boy’s birth father, who we have not hitherto seen, walks up to the bereaved mother and slaps her in the face. It is, amid flattened calm elsewhere, a reminder that emotions churn beneath.

Love Life, which premiered in competition at last year’s Venice Film Festival, begins in relatively happy circumstances. Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and Jiro (Kento Nagayama), her husband, are raising their son Keita (Tetsuda Shimada) in a typically compact Japanese apartment. Fans of the 1970s board game Othello will be interested to learn that it is still played at a high level in Japan – from where world champions emerge – and catches the interest of intelligent, focused kids such as Keita.

Tragedy strikes at a birthday party for Taeko’s father-in-law. When attention is elsewhere, Keita dies in a freak accident and the subsequent pressures test the couple’s relationship to breaking point. The police ask a number of awkward questions. It emerges that Jiro never formally adopted the boy after marrying Taeko. Then Park (Atom Sunada), Keita’s dad, stages his protest in the funeral parlour.

Love Life is not short of narrative diversions. Indeed, though a tad long at two hours, it is stuffed with intertwining plots. We learn that Park is deaf and that he is now homeless. Taeko is forced to assist her ex with sign language when he applies for welfare assistance. Jiro’s parents do not approve of his marriage. And so on.

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For all that toing and froing, the prevailing atmosphere in Love Life is one of studied contemplation. Shot with a camera that, though mostly sedate, will sometimes jostle behind characters as they move towards busy interiors, Fukada’s film, despite its surrounding tragedies, appears willing to accept the possibility of resolution. The title is taken from a song by Akiko Yano that closes the action. Is it meant ironically? Not entirely. There is a sense it is worth fighting to find the least miserable route out of the worst tragedies. A gentle, complex film that will pay rewatching.

Love Life is released on Friday, September 15th