Love Life
Koji Fukada (2022)
High in a Tokyo tower block, preparations are underway for a double celebration. In the living room of an apartment, Taeko (Fumino Kimura) puts the finishing touches to a display proclaiming the victory of Keita (Tetta Shimada), her six-year-old son, in an inter-school competition playing the board game Othello. (Othello-mad Keita takes a dim view of grown-ups calling it a game.) In the kitchen, Taeko’s husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama), prepares food for the party guests who’ll soon be joining the threesome. It’s also his father’s sixty-fifth birthday and Jiro has arranged for a group of his work colleagues to stand outside the apartment block, once the father arrives, holding balloons and happy-birthday placards. Jiro’s parents, Makoto (Tomorowo Taguchi) and Akie (Misuzu Kanno), bring presents for Keita; there’s one from Taeko and Jiro, too – a toy plane. Later, with the party in full swing, Keita entertains himself with the plane, which he takes into the bathroom. When it flies out of reach he climbs onto the ledge above the bath to retrieve it. He slips and falls, hitting his head as he does so. This shocking fatal accident occurs about half an hour into Love Life. It’s a pivotal moment both for the adults in the story and for Koji Fukada’s film as a whole.
Writer-director Fukada introduces the characters, their relationships and the tensions in these, clearly and convincingly. Keita’s biological father is not Jiro but Taeko’s first husband. We learn soon after Makoto arrives that he regards his daughter-in-law as a ‘cast-off’. Akie tells him to apologise and he does, but minimally and grudgingly. Akie then rubs salt in the wound by breezily telling Taeko things will be fine once she has given Makoto and Akie their own grandchild. The few scenes outside the flat are also instructive. Jiro and Taeko both work in social services – he as a manager, she in a centre for homeless people. Ahead of the party, she goes out briefly to deal with an emergency there, which interrupts an Othello session with Keita that he’s been begging her for. On the way to the centre, she bumps into Jiro’s colleagues, due to report for duty soon outside the block of flats. They include Risa (Hirona Yamazaki), who eyes Taeko anxiously. Soon after this brief meeting, Risa decides she can’t go through with the performance and runs away, followed by one of the men in the group. Another man tells a third that Risa used to be Jiro’s girlfriend, whom he ditched in favour of Taeko.
Love Life is engrossing and well acted throughout but this family drama becomes less and less satisfying. For a while, it seems too symmetrically plotted, though that reflects a potentially strong premise: Keita’s death is so unbearable for Taeko and Jiro that both are moved to revert to relationships that preceded their time together. Jiro, after helping his parents move to a new home outside the city, takes the opportunity to visit Risa: they talk about their past relationship and kiss. Risa confesses she was so hurt when Jiro left her for Taeko that she wanted something bad to spoil their happiness; she feels terrible now that something has happened. At this stage, Taeko’s first husband, Park (Atom Sunada), seems to be Risa’s counterpart in Fukada’s scheme but not for long. Park emerges as a much larger element of the story and the ensuing plot involving him is where Love Life really goes awry.
Park, a deaf-mute Korean, first appears, unexpectedly, at Keita’s funeral – a scene nearly as shocking as that of the boy’s death. Wearing a yellow shirt and jeans, dishevelled and wild-eyed, Park is incongruous among the black-clad mourners grieving as decorously as they can. When he sees Taeko, Park hits her; she falls down, screaming hysterically. Before Taeko got together with Jiro, Park walked out on her and Keita, and returned to his native South Korea. Back in Japan, he’s now jobless and homeless, sleeping rough. When he turns up at social services, Taeko is called in to interpret though she doesn’t mention to her colleague that she was married to Park. You’d think his behaviour at Keita’s funeral might be a warning reminder to Taeko of how difficult he was to live with. Far from it. While Jiro is away with his parents, she invites Park home and they share physically intimate moments. By the time Jiro returns, Park is lodging in the apartment, along with a kitten he has somehow acquired. Taeko’s bond with Park proves so strong that, when he receives a letter and tells her he must return to Korea because his father is dying, Taeko decides to leave Jiro and accompany Park. Once they’re in Korea, she discovers that the letter was not about the ailing father but from Park’s grown-up son whose existence is news to Taeko. The son has defied his mother to invite Park to his wedding. Taeko discovers all this backstory at the wedding reception that she and Park, after losing their way and hitching a lift, wander into. Taeko promptly heads back to Tokyo and Jiro.
The early scenes are so well crafted, drawing us into the story, sometimes making us smile. As Taeko and Keita start to play Othello, Jiro light-heartedly complains that he is never invited to play. Next time, Jiro is assured: but a signed exchange between his wife and stepson, behind Jiro’s back, informs us that Keita thinks Jiro is rubbish at Othello so not worth playing. Risa’s defection threatens to wreck the routine designed to greet Makoto; as she and her companion disappear down the street, we notice a couple of nuns standing there; next thing, they’ve been recruited to the birthday group to make up numbers, and are delighted to help out. They come along to the party and enthusiastically join Keita in a karaoke number. After that, even grumpy Makoto is prevailed on to join in the karaoke. As he starts his song, he warns there are seven verses. He’s not halfway through the marathon when Keita takes his toy plane into the bathroom.
The actual cause of death isn’t a head injury but drowning: Keita, concussed, lies unconscious in a bath full of water. Fukada does a fine job directing Tetta Shimada. He’s so engaging, even when Keita is showing off, that the viewer experiences his sudden departure from the film as a wrenching loss. The trouble is, once the story deteriorates into implausible melodrama, you start questioning even what seemed strong points earlier on. If Park abandoned his wife and child several years ago and Keita is only six now, he must have learned sign language in his cradle. If Jiro has organised his father’s birthday celebrations carefully, as everyone says, how come he involved Risa in the first place? Most Western viewers at least will be surprised the bath wasn’t drained after being last used. Taeko bitterly reproaches herself for this, admitting that it’s a bad habit Jiro has kept reminding her about. The bathwater still seems improbable, though, when the family is hosting a party.
As the narrative moves on, signing between Taeko and Park does work well as a secret code between them – particularly in scenes where Jiro is also present and feels excluded. Fukada illustrates in telling details the domestic aftermath to Keita’s death: Taeko takes down reluctantly, bit by bit, the display she put up on the fateful day; the bathroom remains for her a virtual no-go area. At the same time, Fukada and his talented leads impart a strong sense of Taeko’s and Jiro’s life without Keita becoming a new, benumbed normal. I particularly liked a sequence in which, while Jiro takes a bath at home, Taeko visits his parents (before their move) and listens to Akie describe her recent religious conversion after a lifetime of unbelief. Up to this point, Misuzu Kanno’s acting has seemed rather stagy compared with others in the cast but she’s very good in this quiet scene, making Akie strikingly downbeat, almost melancholy in her new-found faith. Also effective is the surprising moment when, after Park’s kitten goes missing and Jiro finds it, Park makes him a gift of the animal. While Fumino Kimura gives a strong performance in what proves to be the main role, most of Love Life’s highlights seem to involve Kento Nagayama’s Jiro. The camera understandably focuses on Taeko immediately after Park’s outburst at the funeral but you also notice Jiro – or part of Jiro – in the shot. Nagayama is so expressive that his left hand on its own seems to convey Jiro’s powerlessness in the situation.
It’s frustrating that Fukada concentrates increasingly on the Taeko-Park relationship somewhat at Jiro’s expense and to the extent of dropping entirely other characters in whom we’ve become interested, especially Jiro’s parents. When Taeko eventually returns to her second husband (and the cat Jiro has inherited) and apologises, she seems almost to be speaking on behalf of the director. It’s some consolation that, right at the end, the film recovers to show the couple’s future together as uncertain. They go for a walk, talking tentatively. As the camera pulls up and away from the apartment building and its environs, a song starts up on the soundtrack and continues through the closing credits. According to Wikipedia, Love Life is ‘inspired by a song of the same name by musician Akiko Yano, originally released on the album of the same name in 1991’. (As far as I can see, Love Life has no Japanese title.) Assuming that this is the dreary music at the end, it’s fair to say that the best parts of Koji Fumada’s film easily surpass its inspiration.
28 September 2024