Venice Review: Koji Fukada’s ‘Love Life’

deadline.com:

Grief and guilt are the twin quiet rivers running beneath Koji Fukada’s ambiguously titled Venice competition entry Love Life, a delicately tangled story of generational conflict and the silences that, without being overtly aggressive, can drive people apart.

Anyone familiar with the work of Japan’s greatest cinema maestro, Yasuhiro Ozu, will recognize the general territory. It is a space within which tectonic social shifts are disguised under layers of traditional social observance, often involving large meals, and where profound emotions may be — and often must be — contained within a glance.Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and Jiro (Kento Nagayama) have been married for around a year, having met several years earlier in the social welfare office where they now both work.

Taeko already had a child, Keita (Tetta Shimada), from a previous marriage to a man who abandoned them when Keita was a baby, perhaps because he was barely able to look after himself; he was deaf and a Korean immigrant, two social disadvantages, but perhaps also something of a wastrel.

Taeko spent years trying to find him, fearing he might have met a grisly end: it was this search that initially brought her to the welfare office.