Love Life

Anyone else remember playing "Othello" (the board game - not the "enemy in your mouth to steal your brains" guy)? I loved it... Anyway, "Taeko" (Fumino Kimura) lives with her second husband "Jirô" (Kento Nagayama) who has cheerfully adopted her rather lively young son "Keita" (Tetta Shimada) who is always playing the game. Indeed he is a champion and part of an online group who thrive at the thing. It's his birthday and he's all excitable. Mum loves a bath but often forgets to drain it afterwards... An accident ensues that leads to her ex-husband "Paku" (the frequently scene-stealing Atomu Sunada) coming back into their lives. He is an homeless, deaf, man and as both work for the local authority, "Jirô" suggests that - not entirely for altruistic reasons - she try to find him an home. His continuing presence puts everyone under a microscope that assesses decisions made and those yet to come for not just the three directly involved, but for grandparents who wanted a grandchild of their own and for people from both of their past lives. It deals with the expected emotions of guilt and torment, but it manages to avoid steeping us in sentimentality nor does it immerse us too depressingly in what is clearly a scenario riddled with grief and "what ifs?". The young Shimada is enjoyable to watch at the start and there is a definite chemistry here as the adults come to terms with their situation. It may seem a little long, but I felt Kôji Fukada paced this well allowing the characters to evolve in a natural fashion and making this quite an enjoyably poignant, at times darkly humorous, tale of family.

When a film starts as joyously as this one, I was all set-up for something totally charming.

Everyone's happy, there's some sweet sequences and everything seems too good.

Then we get something truly terribly and gut-punching, and that is where the themes of this story start to develop.

We see topics of grief, isolation, the importance of communication and the complexity of family life.

However, there were some decisions made both in the casting and narrative in the second half that didn't work for me.

The introductions of certain characters seemed to conflict with how they were being talked about. Plus, some choices in the story felt out of place to me and made no sense as to why they would be happening.

While I appreciate the unexpectedness of the events of the second and final acts, they just didn't sit well with me for one reason or another.

The performance of lead Fumino Kimura is a particular highlight. There was great emotion coming from her even at her most subtle.

Even with those issues I had with it, this was still a pretty solid drama.

It brings out genuine heartbreak with added complexity in character development. It got a bit too contrived for me at times. But the good certainly outweighs everything else.

Love Life is not a light movie. Koji Fukada takes us into the life of Taeko, a woman facing a terrible misfortune. Anyway, as the film progresses, the focus is lost on its central engine, concentrating on another intersected storyline. The motivations behind the actions of the characters unfortunately remain rather vague, and it is difficult to establish a connection with them. The bad dubbing of the film (I did not have the chance to see it in the original version) may be one of the reasons for this inexpressiveness of the characters.

It seems to me that the director wanted to pay homage to the works of Korean director Lee Chang-dong, in particular "Burning" and "Secret Sunshine", but struggled to find his own personal touch.