![]() Things take a less convincing turn with the arrival of Taeko’s deaf Korean ex Park (Atom Sunada), who crashes the funeral to strike her across the face. In the space of a few minutes, the family’s most binding tie is severed, casting the living and grieving immediately adrift.įukada dramatizes the immediate aftermath of the event with credible, suitably mundane delicacy: “Love Life” is best at negotiating periods of strained, not quite simpatico silence, as when Jiro tries to intuit whether or not to take down the party decorations that now accidentally mark Keita’s death, or a shellshocked Taeko attempts to choose photos for a memorial slideshow. The day will turn far worse, however, when Keita suddenly dies in an all-too-conceivable household mishap - one that plays out, only part-visibly, in the space of a single static shot judiciously framed by Fukada and DP Hideo Yamamoto. ![]() Jiro’s parents Makoto (Tomorowo Taguchi) and Akie (Misuzu Kanno) live in the same building, but that too isn’t quite the cozy arrangement it outwardly appears to be: Makoto has never approved of his son’s marrying a divorced mother, and the limits of their cordiality begin to show over the course of the family birthday party that begins proceedings. Their respective routines tend to converge over six-year-old Keita (Tetta Shimada), Taeka’s bright, chipper son from a previous relationship: Though Jiro is a kind father to the lad, the matter of his parentage feels like one more territorial division between spouses who don’t share their lives entirely. The opening scenes establish an early sense of the domestic placidity and faint emotional distance that marks relations between Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and Jiro (Kento Nagayama) in the small, neat apartment they share in a Japanese coastal town. Dignified performances and assured, restrained craftsmanship see the film through to a satisfying enough resolution, but this Venice competition entry may not have the necessary impact to secure widespread arthouse distribution. ![]() “Love Life,” on the other hand, is an earnest, largely humorless affair: While it’s impossible not to be affected at some level by its characters’ hellish plight, the predominant softness of tone here tends toward the wispy. That film was an exercise in disorienting tonal contrast and conflict, with a vein of blood-dark comedy running through severely tragic events. ![]()
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