Love Life: a beautifully creative investigation of what it means to be family

• Reviewed at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.

Fukada Kōji’s Love Life joins several recent works by Japanese filmmakers – including Ishikawa Kei’s A Man (2022) as well as Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Shoplifters (2018) and Broker (2022) – that explore and dismantle the notion of a biological or nuclear family. These films bring together a motley crew of estranged parents, long-lost children and adoptive siblings, together presenting diverse iterations and constructions of ‘family’.

In Love Life, Taeko, her husband Jiro and their six-year-old son Keita live in a small apartment just opposite the block where Jiro’s parents stay – though Jiro’s father makes clear his dissatisfaction at living in such a cramped unit, and blames it on Taeko. Similarly, the comfort and gentleness of Jiro’s mother towards Taeko come with the hushed expectation of a new grandchild. Behind the facade of this ‘nuclear’ family, the proverbial skeletons in Taeko and Jiro’s past awaken when a tragic accident befalls Keita. This brings back Jiro’s ex-girlfriend, Yamazaki, as well as Park Shinji, Taeko’s ex-husband and a deaf Korean citizen living in Japan. Fukada opts for a highly restrained style, allowing the ghosts of the characters’ pasts and the weight of familial expectations to press on the film’s frames.

Inspired by a 1991 song of the same name by Akiko Yano, Love Life tears asunder the blissful promises of family – intimacy, trust and understanding – and suggests that domestic life is plagued by an inescapable loneliness. In their small apartment, Taeko and Jiro often stand close together while they prepare food and make coffee, yet their backs are against each other. Fukada’s film takes the existential treatise further when Jiro’s outwardly religious mother confides in Taeko about her despair at the fact that even with all the kinship and communion of family and marriage, human life ends firmly in solitude.

In Fukada’s careful hands, Taeko and Shinji’s reunion takes on different hues throughout the film – awkward, reluctant, inevitable, tender. The filmmaker does not take shortcuts in capturing the pair’s conversations; instead, the full physicality of their communication in Japanese sign language is on display. Love Life’s refusal of translation and subtitles in some of these scenes is a judicious flourish that reinforces Jiro’s isolation and heightens Fukada’s meditation on loneliness. A hearing audience, like Jiro, is not made privy to Taeko and Shinji’s thoughts.

The film’s title evokes two different interpretations: Love Life can refer to one’s romantic situation and be a plea to cherish one’s existence. Fukada’s film contends that both these paths are treacherously full of heartache and anguish, but its ending quietly offers possibilities for redemption and healing.