Love Life (2023)

Direction: Koji Fukada
Country: Japan 

Shot with the intimacy and formality that is many times associated with Japanese cinema, Love Life is an emotionally complex melodrama rooted in grief, trauma and patriarchy, but branching out into insecurities, reconnections and family subtleties.

Writer, director and editor Koji Fukada (Harmonium, 2016; The Real Thing, 2020) brings us the story of Taeko (Fumino Kimura), and her husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama). The couple works together at the local social service center and is happily married despite Jiro’s father has never approved of their relationship. Taeko has a bright six-year-old son, Keita, from a previous marriage. A shocking tragedy suddenly shakes this family without warning. All of them will have to adapt to the new reality. Keita’s estranged biological father, a homeless Korean man (Atom Sunada), resurfaces shortly after Taeko finds out that Jiro had a fiancée before her, who happens to be their coworker.

Coping with grief and the role of women in the patriarchal Japanese society are not the only central topics here. Loneliness is also very present, clashing with the constant communication - in three different languages - that occurs among the characters. These people are wounded inside and vacillate in several ways when disoriented. We feel them as they breathe the discomfort of their lives in search of love and resilience. 

Melancholy infiltrates an acerbic story that employs too much composure for a plot that, even fairly unpredictable, is meandering and not as moving as the director would have intended it to be. Yet, the beautiful image composition comes with extraordinary sharpness and is to be praised - director of photography Hideo Yamamoto worked extensively with Takashi Miike and contributed to Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks look great.

Fukada signs a drama punctuated with strong sequences of muted disenchantment and discreet humanism. They warn us about the impossibility of controlling life as well as the time required to overcome difficult phases.

The Real Thing (2021)

Direction: Koji Fukada
Country: Japan

This prosaic Japanese rom-com directed by Koji Fukada and adapted from a comic book by Mochiru Hoshisato is a four-hour soap opera that, in the end, showed to have more limitations than qualities. Teaming up with Shintaro Mitani in the script, the Tokyo-born director somehow brings to mind Truffaut’s fictional character Antoine Doinel as his lens focuses on Tsuji (Win Morisaki), a flirtatious young employee of a toys-and-fireworks company. Bored with life, the latter maintains two simultaneous relationships with female co-workers, Ms. Hosokawa (Kei Ishibashi) and Minako (Akari Fukunaga), and even promises to marry them. However, after saving the life of Ukiyo (Kaho Tsuchimura), a secretive woman with an erratic behavior and suspicious connections, he starts to obsess with her and his life is turned into hell.

Fukada tries a new angle but doesn’t reinvent the formula, stretching the plot of a volatile tale that plays as a tiresome game of seduction, lies and fragility. The filmmaker, most known for his 2016 Cannes-awarded drama film Harmonium, arranges everything with plenty of betrayals and reconciliations, jealousy and retaliation, dreams and disappointment, while the chain of characters - fluctuating between allies and enemies that whether support or depend on each other - is uninteresting in its essence. 

Even the final twist feels calculated and overcooked, making The Real Thing a frivolous, wishy-washy cinematic experience.

Harmonium (2017)

Directed by Koji Fukada
Country: Japan

Japanese helmer Koji Fukada, active since 2008, has in "Harmonium" his best film so far. As an advocate of solemn dramas with surprising twists, Mr. Fukada, who also penned the script, keeps us entangled in a web of emotions, revelations, and startles, that pushes his film beyond the surface. The severe psychological backbone of the story ended up convincing the members of the jury panel at Cannes Film Festival, where the film won the Un Certain Regard prize.

Kanji Furutachi, a regular presence in Fukada films, is Toshio, a metalworker who lives a quiet life in the company of his wife, Akie (Mariko Tsutsui) and their young daughter, Hotaru.
While mother and daughter always pray to God before eating, Toshio eats avidly and almost doesn’t talk. In truth, and regardless his love for them, he doesn’t pay much attention to their needs and often falls in rudimentary behaviors.

On a certain day, Toshio gets the visit of an intriguing old friend, Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano), who just got out of jail, where he has spent 11 years for killing a young man. Toshio immediately hires this man and invites him to live with him and his family, a strange decision that makes Akie in the verge of an attack of nerves. At this point, and observing the two men’s ways, we conclude that there’s a past debt to be paid off.

However, little by little, Akie is beguiled by the gentleness and availability of Yasaka, who acts respectful, attentive, and becomes very handy at home. He even teaches Hotaru playing a song in the harmonium for her upcoming public performance. Akie spends more and more time with him and gets emotional when he goes into his troubled past. Forbidden kisses are exchanged between them on a sunny weekend day in the countryside as the family reunites with a friend. Still, Akie continues to resist him at home, frustrating his furtive advances and forcing a different personality to emerge in him.

Her disappointment and guilt are immeasurable when Hotaru is found on a sidewalk, inanimated with thick blood covering her head and with the rancorous Yasaka at her side. The madness expressed on his face dissipates all the possible doubts about the perpetrator of the monstrous act.
 
Eight years after, Yasaka remains untraceable while Hotaru, completely paralyzed, is perpetually confined to a wheelchair. The couple has opposite reactions: while Toshio dreams with revenge, Akie is haunted by visions of the murderer and her nervous system is visibly damaged.
 
The arrival of Takashi (Taiga), Toshio's young new apprentice, will bring additional information about Yasaka. After so many years, is the couple ready to give up searching for the beast who took their peace of mind?

The slow yet penetrating plot development emphasizes the inherent fatalism of a story that, besides crime and evilness, also deals with karma and selfishness. An unblinking camera mounts compulsive scenarios, where an obstinate symbolism with the red color leads to a creepy, unsettling finale. 

The surprising factor is crucial and only one scene by the end feels forced, when the couple finds someone that looks exactly like Yasaka from behind, teaching harmonium to a young girl.
Apart from that quibble, the director competently elucidates us about how hard it is, in certain cases, to forgive and forget.