07/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: Rising Japanese maestro Kôji Fukada steps up to his first major festival competition slot with this neatly structured tale of intersecting marriages

Fumino Kimura and Tetta Shimada in Love Life

Kôji Fukada’s Venice competition title Love Life [+see also:
trailer
interview: Kōji Fukada
film profile] is like an experiment to see if you could shake out all of the component parts of a typically rich family melodrama – perhaps something by Farhadi, or indeed even Kore-eda – either hollowing out its centre, or leaving just a few key, asymmetrical elements in place like the end of a round of Jenga. And although it may initially appear juvenile to mention that rainy-day classic family game, Fukada’s film is also one where the separately mature and immature worlds of adults and their offspring converge: it even begins with a quaintly colourful 65th birthday party for the key family’s grandfather, decked out with a batch of balloons ricocheting into the air. And the youngest family member, a six-year-old step-grandson, is the local champion of an online multiplayer puzzle game, curiously called Othello, which acquires a strange, continuing resonance even as the plot follows the generations above him.

Don’t be alarmed by any potential Wes Andersonian tweeness: this is a very interesting film, Fukada’s first to play in competition at one of the three major European festivals, after much exposure elsewhere on the circuit. A Japanese-French co-production – also reflected in the fact that creatives from the latter territory occupy below-the-line credits – it premiered earlier this week at Venice, after which it will head to Toronto and BFI London.

Love Life is a haunting, sometimes subdued, dramatic piece, with an original way of exploring how a collective mourning process might lead all participants to make quite abrupt, radical changes to their lives. In a role that early critics of this film have compared to a classic melodrama heroine – in a 1950s Hollywood film or from a shomin-geki, the more traditionally Japanese form of family drama – Fumino Kimura excels as Taeko, a social services sign-language interpreter who, after a devastating loss, oscillates between her current husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama), and her estranged former one, Park (Atom Sunada), who is deaf and communicates with her in JSL (Japanese Sign Language). When he barrels back into her life after the tragedy, Park and Taeko seem to have the bond and mutual respect that had eluded them when they were officially together (and in one of the film’s handful of intentional ellipses, we never discover the circumstances of how they met, although we can indeed guess).

Makoto (Tomorowo Taguchi) and Akie (Misuzu Kanno), Jiro’s parents, have moved from one of the properties that they occupied, and which they have also given up to him, in an unspecified exurban area of Japan. And Jiro, too, is seeing (but not seeing) Yamazaki (Hirona Yamazaki), an ex, in the aftermath of all this, really just for someone to commiserate with and process the situation. As seen in his past, weaker works Harmonium [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and A Girl Missing [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], Fukada seems fascinated by the idea of displacement and deferment, and how emotional relations can be complicated, yet also spontaneous and bizarre. And boy, does that link to his mise-en-scène as well, with its alternating drab and peachy colours, and a mid-film mobile tracking shot that fascinatingly “breaks the rules” by denying us the image stabilisation of, say, a Steadicam rig: the camera jolts with each step the operator takes, following a desperate Taeko as she pursues someone. It’s a moment of such flair.

Love Life was staged by Nagoya Broadcasting Network (Japan) and Comme des Cinémas (France). Its world sales are handled by mk2 films.

Photogallery 05/09/2022: Venice 2022 - Love Life

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Koji Fukada, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Atom Sunada, Fumino Kimura, Anne Pernod-Sawada, Yasuhiko Hattori, Masa Sawada, Alberto Barbera
© 2022 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it