For most of the domestic dramas that Koji Fukada’s Love Life resembles, their stories are processes of slowly letting an audience into a small intimate world, gaining deeper understanding of characters and their milieu as we progress. To very limited success, Fukada reverses this dynamic, quickly giving us an insight into a middle class Japanese family unit facing tragedy before, through a series of rather laboured plot turns and tonal shifts, making their world more and more distant from us. It’s a technique that, in theory, makes for an effective externalisation of the isolation and confusion of grief but, in practice, eventually turns Love Life into a rather inscrutable farce.
From the off, there’s a decent amount of backstory to take in – we see a weekend morning in the life of a family of three; wife Taeko (Fumino Kimura), husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama), and their jolly and board-game-obsessed young son Keita (Tetta Shimada), but it’s not long before the convolutions in this dynamic make themselves evident. As it transpires, Keita is not Jiro’s son, instead being Taeko’s child from a previous marriage (a dynamic abhorred by Jiro’s emotionally inept parents), while Taeko and Jiro’s relationship was born from a workplace affair (they both work at the local employment/welfare centre), and Jiro’s ex still works with them.
All these ingredients keep bubbling under the surface, but are pushed to one side by the sudden accidental death of Keita, which, naturally, spiritually annihilates Taeko. It’s here that Love Life is both at its simplest and at its best, Fukada finding intriguing insights into the way people make the grief of others about themselves and the notion of ‘dying alone’ and what that really means. It’s in the arrival of Taeko’s ex – and Keita’s biological dad – Park (Atom Sunada) that things start to go off the rails though.
Though it’s not the first moment to strain credulity (even Keita’s death doesn’t ring all that true), Park’s arrival mostly kills dead the sort of raw believability that lends a story like Love Life’s its power. For one, he’s a homeless, mute, Korean man, which is a few degrees of quirk too many, and pretty much every subsequent plot move involving him is laboured and ridiculous, especially one astonishingly contrived twist in the final act that is Fukada’s get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing the plots to resolve without any recognisable human decision-making.
As a parable about grief, Love Life may make for an effective short story or even thrive in a more literary medium – there’s some undeniable cleverness in Fukada’s deployment of metaphor and analogy. But there just simply isn’t enough emotional punch here to sustain for its two-plus hour runtime – trapped between being a slice of life and something more akin to magical realism, it falls into the lethal no man’s land of being neither.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 