If Hirokazu Koreeda (SHOPLIFTERS, BROKER) is Japan’s king of family dramas, Kôji Fukada is his evil twin. The latter makes films about complex familial relationships too, but often with a nasty twist. His latest feature LOVE LIFE, which premiered in competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival, is a chilling, constantly surprising, at times downright creepy portrayal of the secrets we keep from those closest to us. It exposes family as a construct and reveals hypocrisies that are deeply disturbing to watch.
The film opens with Taeko (Fumino Kimura), a young woman working at a soup kitchen, in the middle of preparations for a party at her home shared with husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama) and son Keita. Not only has Keita won a board game championship, but Jiro’s father is turning 65. Since Jiro is working at his father’s company (and living in an apartment gifted by his parents), he invited colleagues to come and celebrate the boss’s birthday together. Everything seems wholesome and harmonious except for two little details: among the colleagues invited is apparently a girl who’s “not supposed” to be there, and when Jiro’s mother whispers to Taeko to make grandchildren of their own, there’s something cryptically aggressive in her tone. But the party goes on. And just when the guests are starting to enjoy themselves, a terrible accident happens, one that would rip apart the illusions of a perfect family.
Fukada’s script is constructed very much like a thriller. It presents you with a familiar premise, only to slowly, carefully subvert all you think you know. The accident is an ingeniously conceived twist, not only because it shakes the narrative violently alive, but it challenges bonds that are meant to be sacred and finds truths that are inconvenient and ugly. Like cracks spreading through glass, the plot continues to develop in unforeseen directions following the accident, introducing us to previous relationships of both Taeko and Jiro. And as the circumstances surrounding Keita’s birth and the marriage between Taeko and Jiro gradually come to light, you begin to see the dynamics between all of them very differently.
As much as I’m (pleasantly) creeped out by many of Fukada’s observations, the story is not without its pure, hopeful moments. The relationship between Taeko and her ex-husband Park, for example, turns out to be a mostly honest one. She provides him with food and shelter in his times of need, and he offers her company when she most desperately craves it. Although this unlikely partnership will end in a lie as well, there’s an innocence to it despite, or because of the fact that they are no longer family and not bound to each other in any way. I sense that same innocence at the very end of the film, when Taeko and Jiro reunite at their home. After all they’ve been through, taking a walk probably won’t solve their problems, but you have to start somewhere. It’s a quiet ending that sees love in its simplest, most essential form and subtly refutes the societal institutions invented in its name.
Fukada is a master of suspense and the tension he builds and maintains throughout much of the film is absolutely delicious. The choices he makes – like Taeko’s emotional state after the accident or the reaction of the uninvited female colleague upon seeing the party balloons – are often counterintuitive and leave you with that uneasy feeling of witnessing an inexplicably wrong situation. The way he composes his shots are also highly suggestive. There’s a scene at a memorial service where an unexpected guest shows up and does something shocking. The staging and editing of the incident are so effective one would be forgiven to gasp.
Kimura gives a strong performance of a complex woman with many faces. When we first meet Taeko, she seems like just a dutiful housewife. But when she defends herself against an offhand remark by her father-in-law 10 minutes into the film, you notice a coldness in her that immediately tells you there’s much more to this person than meets the eye. And the richness of her character keeps expanding as we later learn about her past. The reasons for Taeko’s kindness towards Park are not always obvious, but from her purposeful, unaffected performance it’s clear that she knows everything that goes through the guarded mind of a survivor.
We are 2/3 way through the festival and honstly the competition is stacked this year – even the suspected fillers have proved conspicuously painless. And now we can add LOVE LIFT to that ever-growing list of films deserving of recognition.
