Inspired by Japanese singer and musician Akiko Yano's song 'Love Life', the film tells the story of Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and her husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama) who are living a peaceful existence with her young son Keita (Tetta Shimada), when a tragic accident brings the boy’s long-lost father, Park (Atom Sunada), back into Taeko’s life. To cope with the pain and guilt she feels after the accident, Taeko throws herself into helping this deaf and homeless man for whom she has a strong sense of responsibility.

Kôji Fukada powerfully uses sign language in the film and has said of this choice that ‘I don’t have to come up with reasons to have hearing people in my films, so it would be unfair to ask for a reason to have a deaf person. Hopefully, this film will be a step towards this becoming the norm, where we don’t demand a special reason to have deaf people in films. That would be a great innovation to come out of this.’

The Garden Cinema View:

The evolution of Kōji Fukada’s filmmaking approach from the lovely, Rohmer-esque, Goodbye Summer, through slow burn thrillers such as Harmonium (very good) and A Girl Missing (forgettable) traces a line from a looseness and lightness to studied, passive, observation. Love Life is perhaps a refinement of this style: a melodrama where tears are neither jerked nor emotions tugged. Which is not to say this is a film drained of dramatic beats. Indeed a straight synopsis of Love Life would likely evoke something quite overripe. It is within Fukada’s mature and controlled aesthetic that the narrative swerves are earned, and emotional blows land heavy.      

Cast:
Fumino Kimura, Kento Nagayama, Atom Sunada, Hirona Yamazaki