Love Life review – frus­trates its own poignance with melodrama

In the ele­gant­ly sim­ple board game Oth­el­lo, two oppo­nents – one plac­ing down black coun­ters, the oth­er white – aim to have the most pieces on the board. Play­ers can only place a counter down where anoth­er of their coun­ters is already on the oppo­site end of the row – then, every ​‘ene­my’ counter between the player’s two book­end­ing pieces can be flipped over. A domi­no effect is set into motion, entire­ly alter­ing the land­scape of the board.

Oth­el­lo is a well-cho­sen cen­tral alle­go­ry, then, for Koji Fukuda’s ninth fea­ture Love Life. Revolv­ing around moth­er and social work­er Taeko (Fumi­no Kimu­ra, in a qui­et­ly strong-head­ed and emo­tion­al­ly trans­par­ent per­for­mance), ​‘Love Life’ is a sto­ry where one moment in time gen­er­ates rip­pling, life-alter­ing effects – but only with the pres­ence of a part­ner at the end of the line. Change echoes and rever­ber­ates, but in pairs.

While sun-dap­pled laun­dry dries on the bal­cony, Taeko plays a game of Oth­el­lo with her pre­co­cious six-year-old son Kei­ta (an imme­di­ate­ly charm­ing Tet­su­da Shi­ma­da), a com­pet­i­tive Oth­el­lo cham­pi­on. Her hus­band Jiro (a wood­en yet rather impul­sive Ken­to Nagaya­ma), isn’t Keita’s bio­log­i­cal father, but he cares for the boy like one thinks a father would – though as he cooks din­ner in their com­pact home, Jiro seems curi­ous­ly unable to look any­one in the eye. That after­noon, Kei­ta slips in a bath­tub and drowns.

The stom­ach-drop­ping con­cus­sive sound of his skull hit­ting ceram­ic utter­ly inverts the film’s qui­et, domes­tic uni­verse, and Taeko and Jiro’s apart­ment becomes a child’s grave. The Oth­el­lo game will nev­er be played to com­ple­tion, but the board is kept as a reminder of Keita’s life, snatched away.

White tiles irre­versibly turn black, and Taeko and Jiro’s young mar­riage is plunged into the shock­ing waters of sud­den loss and unprocess­able grief. They’re each thrown back into the orbit of their ex-part­ners: Jiro recon­nects with his ex-girl­friend, while Taeko’s estranged ex-hus­band and Keita’s father, a deaf Kore­an man named Park Shin­ji (an earnest and expres­sive Atom Suna­da), storms into their son’s funer­al and slaps Taeko.

The hot rage of Park’s grief, which rings sharp and dis­so­nant at Keita’s solemn­ly mut­ed funer­al ser­vice, trig­gers Taeko’s real­i­sa­tion that her cur­rent hus­band is unable to mourn Kei­ta in the way that she and her ex-hus­band must. As she con­fides to Park, his anger became the only thing that made sense: every­one else mere­ly attempts to ​“get used to a world with­out [Kei­ta] as quick­ly as possible.”

Love Life promis­ing­ly begins to explore the chasm between irrec­on­cil­able lan­guages of grief, and the entire dor­mant uni­verse of expe­ri­ences we share with those who leave our lives and make their returns. But tan­gled in the soap-oper­at­ics of a fam­i­ly dra­ma, it turns episod­ic, and jar­ring­ly (or worse, unin­ten­tion­al­ly) comedic. Its final act is com­posed of such under­cooked plot devel­op­ments that its emo­tion­al stakes lose all import. With so many loose ends that none of its strands feel res­o­nant, Love Life, unfor­tu­nate­ly, fades out over the music, frus­trat­ing­ly slight.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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