‘Love Life’ Review: Encounters in Grief

The Japanese writer-director Koji Fukada made his worldwide mark with “Harmonium” (2017). Like that movie, “Love Life,” his newest characteristic, considerations a household shaken up each by an outsider’s arrival and by a sudden tragedy, this time within the reverse order.

Taeko (Fumino Kimura) is elevating a 6-year-old son, an Othello board sport prodigy named Keita (Tetta Shimada), together with her husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama). The association wasn’t Jiro’s authentic plan: He had been getting ready to marry a colleague, however he cheated on her with Taeko and ended up marrying Taeko as an alternative. Taeko was already a mom to Keita, whose father deserted them. Now Jiro’s dad and mom, particularly his dad, scorn Taeko and Keita as not theirs.

Then — in a improvement that happens round 20 minutes in, necessitating a spoiler warning — Keita dies whereas sustaining a concussion in a bath accident, after wandering off throughout a celebration. (Fukada, who elsewhere favors a placid, unobtrusive visible fashion, performs the drowning for suspense with an exceptionally merciless gradual zoom.)

The dying lures again Keita’s absent father, Park (Atom Sunada), a South Korean man who can also be deaf, and who, crashing the funeral, instantly hits Taeko earlier than slapping himself. The recriminations, and efforts to downplay recriminations, start. Taeko can’t forgive Park for leaving, however she additionally believes he wants her assist. Jiro feels responsible for his relative lack of guilt.

It’s extra a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character. Part of Fukada’s rationale could also be that easy catharsis can be too simple. But his drama is facile in different methods, significantly in its use of kid endangerment as a tool.

Love Life
Not rated. In Japanese, Korean and Korean signal language, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters.