Grief and guilt are the twin quiet rivers running beneath Koji Fukada’s ambiguously titled Venice competition entry Love Life, a delicately tangled story of generational conflict and the silences that, without being overtly aggressive, can drive people apart. Anyone familiar with the work of Japan’s greatest cinema maestro, Yasuhiro Ozu, will recognize the general territory. It is a space within which tectonic social shifts are disguised under layers of traditional social observance, often involving large meals, and where profound emotions may be — and often must be — contained within a glance.
Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and Jiro (Kento Nagayama) have been married for around a year, having met several years earlier in the social welfare office where they now both work. Taeko already had a child, Keita (Tetta Shimada), from a previous marriage to a man who abandoned them when Keita was a baby, perhaps because he was barely able to look after himself; he was deaf and a Korean immigrant, two social disadvantages, but perhaps also something of a wastrel. Taeko spent years trying to find him, fearing he might have met a grisly end: it was this search that initially brought her to the welfare office.
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For Jiro’s parents, all these things are black marks against Taeko. The fact that their son has married a woman slightly older than he is, who has a child not of their blood, that she should have had something so irregular in her life as a deaf husband: couldn’t Jiro have done better? “Cast-offs are fine,” says his mother within Taeko’s hearing, “but not for everything.”
Jiro is calm in the face of this hostility. They are married now, he says reasonably, so they will have to wear it; Keita may not be his child, but he loves and cares for him as a hands-on modern father. It is harder for Taeko, who suffers their visits, insults and bigoted conversational gambits with surreptitiously gritted teeth. There is no avoiding them; they own the apartment where the couple live, just across a public square from their own. It is during one of their excruciating visits that Keita, left to his own devices, drowns in his leftover bath water.
Fukada presents this terrible event with chilling restraint, holding the camera for a seeming eternity on the side of the bath that nobody thought to drain. Taeko swings between bleak grief and blaming herself. When her estranged husband Park (Atom Sunada) bursts into the funeral, runs over to her screaming and attacks her, she succumbs to his flailing blows willingly. Spaces are crucial to this film: while the apartment seems tiny whenever the parents are there, so squashed that they can’t even close a door, the funeral home is an arena, a vast empty space where Park charges in like a bull looking for a matador. Every interior has a story to tell.
What follows Keita’s death is complicated. Nobody knows what they are supposed to feel. Jiro will say later that he felt left behind, that he felt he didn’t have enough grief to contribute. This mismatched bereavement creates a distance between the couple, while Taeko feels increasingly drawn to the dilapidated Park. He is homeless, jobless and obviously erratic, but she is responsible for him. As the only person in range who knows Korean sign language, she is his link with the world; he needs her. And he was Keita’s father, the man with whom she made a family.
Fumino conveys this confused grasping at the straws of the past with such commitment that Taeko never seems either weak or less than sympathetic, even at her most deluded; as Jiro tells her, more in sorrow than anger, Park is neither weak nor needy, but he is certainly manipulative. She doesn’t listen; she can’t listen. Jiro, the rejected husband, is bewildered as his domestic idyll falls to pieces.
All this is the stuff of melodrama, but Love Life never feels like one. Fukada works in pale colors, suburban settings and, in the early scenes, the kind of plinking musical score more typical of Japanese romances, all of which pulls the huge events that follow – Keita’s death, the return of Park, his monstrousness – back into the realm of the everyday. As a melodrama that has been normalized, it may be turned down way too low for some audiences. They may feel as if nothing much happened, however stuffed with tragic events it actually was. But for those of us who love silent family dramas where even eating noodles becomes a meaningful act, Love Life makes Koji Fukada a director to watch.
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