LOVE LIFE

DIRECTOR: Kōji Fukada

123 MINS, japan, france, 2022, SUBTITLED

Official Selection, Venice International Film Festival 2022

Screening followed by a Q&A with writer-director Kōji Fukada, hosted by film critic Tara Brady (The Irish Times)

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Thanks to Bridge Interpreting and TCD Centre for Deaf Studies for sponsoring this inclusive event.

Taeko (the wonderful Fumino Kimura) lives in a small Japanese city with her husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama) and her eight year old son Keita, from a previous marriage to deaf Korean-Japanese Park Shinji (Atom Sunada). After a tragic accident, homeless and jobless Park reappears in Taeko’s life. Taeko is the only person who can communicate, using Japanese sign language, with Park, and this disrupts Taeko and Jiro’s already unbalanced relationship.

Through acute observation and brilliant, naturalistic performances, acclaimed Japanese director Kōji Fukada's (Harmonium; A Girl Missing; The Real Thing) mundane domesticity and suburban settings become ambiguous and unsettling. Fukada explores and upsets the flawed emotional relationships of tidy traditional middle-class family life and everyday social order. Observed with harrowing coldness through static camera set ups, abrupt pacing and narrative shifts subvert the illusionary unity and surface to reveal the underlying tension. Sign language is brilliantly used in Love Life as link and division between the characters, and this beautifully reflected through visual details of gestures.

NOTES BY MARIE-PIERRE RICHARD