2023-06-13 18:58:15
Love Life ***
de Koji Fukada
Japanese movie, 2:04
He is the least known of Japanese filmmakers in France. And yet, in about ten years, the little music of Koji Fukada, 43, with its Rohmerian accents and its characters shrouded in strangeness has ended up imposing itself, discreetly, but surely. Like another filmmaker of his generation, Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car, Tales of chance and other fantasies), he signs sensitive and delicate films where the unknown – or the drama – arises in the middle of everyday life and reveals the deepest feelings. An elegant score which, since goodbye summer (2013) et Harmonium (2016), jury prize “Un certain regard” at the Cannes Film Festival, seduces festivals around the world and confirms an unabashed talent.
A love quartet
After Follow me I’m escaping you et Escape me and I will follow youvery nice diptych on the feeling of love adapted from a successful manga (The Real Thing), the filmmaker is back with a family drama, presented at the last Venice Film Festival, about a blended family who must face the ghosts of the past. With, at the center of the plot, Taeko, a young woman who lives with her husband, Jiro, and Keita, the son she had from a previous union. In spite of a strong character, this one lives badly not to be accepted by her parents-in-law who reject this union and reproaches her for not having yet given them a grandchild. During a birthday party, an unexpected event occurs and upsets the order of things.
As Taeko discovers the existence of a former fiancée of her husband, Yamazaki, who has never really recovered from their separation, Park, Keita’s biological father, a hearing-impaired and homeless Korean, reappears in their lives. Between these four characters, the relationships are recomposed according to a scenario that makes us go from amazement to surprises and reveals all the unspoken things in their story. ” Life is full of surprises, explains the director. Human beings, by nature, cannot help but hope for a “pre-established harmony”, but in most cases this is only a vain illusion. When I make a film, I always hope to be able to represent on the screen a feeling of surprise equivalent to the unpredictability of our existence, and even more the suspense that results from it. »
An extremely neat staging
In a minimalist staging, but with an extremely careful construction, Koji Fukada sets up a variation on love, betrayal, mourning and unexpressed feelings. The film is entirely circumscribed to a few places – the couple’s apartment, their workplace in adjacent buildings, the park where Keita’s father lives – symbols of both the proximity and the distance between its protagonists. Like these two blocks of buildings facing each other where the couple and the in-laws live. The only two escapes from the film, when Jiro goes to the countryside and Taeko leaves for South Korea to bring back her ex-husband, allow us to get out of this extremely constrained framework, like the shackles of Japanese society, and release indispensable truths.
With an apparent simplicity, the film is teeming with a thousand details, each of which takes on its importance, such as the posture of the bodies filmed often with their backs turned, as if to accentuate the weight of their loneliness or the sign language, which both bring Taeko together and isolate and Park, allowing them to express feelings better than with words. It gives rise to several intense scenes, including that of their nocturnal reunion in a city park. Koji Fukada thus constantly plays between shadows and lights – Chinese shadows, the reflection of the CD. His melodrama, both disconcerting and subtle, takes us on a roller coaster ride of their feelings with his heroes, at the cost of an original wound that will perhaps hurt the most sensitive souls.
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The rising star of Japanese cinema
Koji Fukada was born in 1980 in Tokyo and graduated from the Film School of Tokyo.
He cut his teeth in animated films while directing his first feature film La Grenadiere – adaptation of a short story by Honoré de Balzac – and in the theatre, as an assistant director to playwright Oriza Hirata.
He is making his first film Hospitality in 2010followed bygoodbye summer (2013) and Sayonara (2015). in 2016Harmonium wins the jury prize “Un certain regard” at the Cannes Film Festival and The Nurse in 2019 is selected at the Locarno Festival (Switzerland). The diptych Follow me I’m escaping you et Escape me and I will follow you receives the Cannes 2020 label despite the cancellation of the festival.
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