2023-06-21 06:02:02
Another new film by Kōji Fukada, following Harmonium, the Nurse, et Follow me, I’m running from you / Flee from me, I’m following you. And yet another success for this director who continues the gesture of great Japanese cinema!
2022 LOVE LIFE FILM PARTNERS & COMME DES CINEMAS
Placarded on the walls of the corridors of the Paris metro, the poster of Love Lifethe new film by Kōji Fukada, urges us above all not to reveal to people who have not seen the film what its subject is… Either a rather naive way of suggesting to the average cinephile, not necessarily tempted by the viewing of a Japanese auteur film, a Sixth Sense effect, or something like that. However, nothing is further from this calm, rather contemplative cinema than the springs of the thriller, even psychological, of US films, and this false promise of the poster is likely to make many disappointed! Which does not mean that the scenario of Love Life is not remarkable, and full of surprises and unexpected reversals, but these “coups de theater”, which are not without evoking once once more the fantasies ofEric Rohmer, are played in a minor key – even when terribly dramatic – which separates them from the “WOW!” effect. » that we expect from the too clever twists of contemporary cinema.
Kōji Fukada, of which we had enjoyed films like Harmonium et the nursebut also the TV series released in a format of two films in France, Follow me, I’m running from you / Flee from me, I’m following youis also a screenwriter for his Love Life, which tells us regarding the ordeals through which a young couple goes, whose marriage was not well received by the husband’s family, and who will be confronted with “the worst”. Will this abyss that will open in front of them engulf them, especially since each on their own, they will be confronted with the return of a past that they thought they had left far behind them? As much to say nothing more (and therefore to respect the injunctions of the poster), so much the intelligence of the scenario of Fukada deserves the innocence of our gaze…
But the real beauty of Love Life goes far beyond the quality of its writing, and nestles above all in the accuracy, in the honesty of the gaze cast on all the protagonists, the most devious (they lie but we love them all the same) as the most sincere (we love them but they also lie…). With a perfect rhythm – neither too fast nor too slow -, framings combining significance and beauty, a direction of actors drawn to the cord, and with a music reduced to the strict minimum, Love Life finds the pure beauty of the great Japanese cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, while being definitely modern: social (helping the homeless), cultural (like the online games where little Keita triumphs) and political (these still not very obvious relations between Koreans and Japanese) considerations nourish a much more complex plot than one imagines a priori, without ever Love Life does not lose the thread of its story, despite its twists and turns.
The most negative critics of the film sometimes found it “sluggish”, no doubt because Fukada uses very little of the classic mechanisms of cinema to make people laugh or cry, or even simply to interest and seduce their viewers. He relies on our intelligence and our ability to grasp the crucial importance of the little “things in life” – simple or a little offbeat – that he shows in the film (nuns who are recruited to complete a birthday party , a little cat that gets lost, a couple that no longer looks into each other’s eyes, a wedding drowned in the rain, etc.). And it is then that the emotion is born, even overwhelms us.
In a fairly devastated contemporary Japanese cinema, Fukada is definitely one of the directors who still believes in cinema, who follows the example of a Naruse or a Ozu, while renovating this beautiful tradition thanks to its sense of facetiousness (even at the heart of the most terrible dramas) and the absurdity of life. “Everybody lies”, says in conclusion his Love Lifebut you have to live well, and love yourself all the same.
Eric Debarnot
Love Life
Japanese film by Koji Fukada
Avec : Fumino Kimura, Kento Nagayama, Atom Sunada…
Genre : drame, romance
Duration: 2h04
Theatrical release date: June 14, 2023
1687330922
#Love #Life #Kōji #Fukada #lies..