Love Life
Kôji Fukada’s latest film begins as a tribute to Ozu, but its initial delights are not sustained.
I can recall no other film that gave me as much pleasure and yet disappointed me in equal measure. The reason for that can readily be stated but let us start with the positive elements. Love Life is a film by the established Japanese director Kôji Fukada whose work here evokes the family dramas for which my favourite director, Yasujirō Ozu, was famous. Fukada’s style is quite different from Ozu’s – no emphasis here on static shots taken at a set height – but the tone of Love Life is marked by at least three characteristics central to Ozu’s work. I refer to his emphasis on everyday life, the reliance on ensemble playing and the deep sense of humanity apparent in the way that the characters are portrayed. Furthermore, Love Life is indeed a family drama, one featuring a married couple, Jirô (Kento Nagayama) and Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and six-year-old Keita (Tetta Shimada) who is Taeko’s son by her first marriage to a Korean, Park Shinji (Atom Sunada), who had deserted her. Jirô’s parents, Makoto (Tomorowa Taguchi) and Myoe (Misuzu Kanno) live nearby and, indeed, the opening scenes are largely centred on a family celebration of a double kind—Makoto is having his 65th birthday and young Keita has just won a contest playing his favourite board game, Othello.
Love Life leaves its credit titles to the end so there is all the more a strong sense of plunging straight into the ordinary life of this family. There may be moments when we feel slightly disorientated as when an early scene unexpectedly takes place in a soup kitchen in which a conflict erupts—the connection is that Taeko is working there but its relevance feels unclear. However, we soon find ourselves admiring a portrayal of life that feels so true that it is possible to take the view that, despite the existence of other films echoing Ozu’s work, including Koreeda’s memorable Still Walking (2008), this is the closest yet that cinema has come to matching him. In keeping with that, Keita very much brings to mind the children seen in Ozu’s films and one of the most memorable details in Love Life is the boy’s response when Jirô and Taeko have been arguing and then become fearful that Keita has overheard them causing them to ask if he has been shocked: the reply given directly and simply is “not really”.
Some critics may feel that they should say more about the subject matter here, but I think that it is more appropriate to say only that the celebration is cut short when a tragic accident occurs. It could easily have been the case that this scene would suddenly take on the feel of melodrama and it is one of the great triumphs of Love Life that it doesn’t. As Fukada handles it the incident plays like a real life moment in which out of the blue something terrible happens.
It is less characteristic of Ozu that Fukada’s screenplay should feature elements in which the past influences the present. This aspect includes the way in which Jirô’s parents, especially his father, had hoped that their son would marry a girl named Yamazaki (Hirona Yamazaki) and remain unhappy that he jilted her to marry Taeko (she had been an employee at the social services centre of which Jirô is the manager and remains in post). Furthermore, in a way that convinces we find Park Shenji turning up again and then, because he is deaf and is now seeking state benefits, it is Taeko who is asked to interpret his sign language, she being proficient in this from the time when they were together. These background elements may not echo Ozu but they do not infringe the film’s sense of realism because they are part and parcel of the situation in which the family find themselves.
So far, so more than good. However, Fukada then chooses to switch to the kind of story in which plotting becomes all too prominent. As the story builds so do the contrivances and the sense that we are now watching something altogether more fictional. Several touches suggest this and at other times the writing feels schematic. Worse still, Love Life offers what seem like two concluding scenes one after the other. The first of these carries a contrived echo of an earlier scene before concluding with an upbeat dance by Taeko which, while lacking in conviction, appears to be set up to fit in with the film’s optimistic title and to show her ready to counter whatever life throws at her. The second scene is hardly more persuasive as it questioningly hints at a positive outcome. That this note is struck to the accompaniment of a title song underlines the extent to which Ozu has been left far behind. The irony, of course, is that this film’s second half might have been more acceptable had the first half not been such a superb example of a work in a mode so different from where Fukata’s film opts to go.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Fumino Kimura, Kento Nagayama, Tomorowa Taguchi, Atom Sunada, Hirona Yamazaki, Misuzu Kanno, Tetta Shimada, Akari Fukunaga, Natsume Mito, Yoshiko Urayama.
Dir Kôji Fukada, Pro Yasuhiko Hattori, Masa Sawed and Yuko Kameda, Screenplay Kôji Fukada, Ph Hideo Yamamoto, Pro Des Masaki Owa, Ed Kôji Fukada and Sylvie Lager, Music Olivier Goinard, Costumes Hanaka Kikuchi.
Chipangu/Comme des Cinémas/Nagoya Broadcasting Network-BFI Distribution.
123 mins. Japan/France. 2022. UK Rel: 15 September 2023. Cert. 12A.
