Great tragedies lead to reuniting with people from the past and awaken feelings that seemed forgotten. This is what happens in Love Life, the latest film by Japanese director Kôji Fukada, known for films like Harmonium (2016) or A Girl Missing (2019). This family melodrama follows Taeko, a young woman who lives with her husband Jiro and her son Keita in a small Japanese town where everyone seems to know each other. Their lives change radically when Keita, who is the son of Taeko's previous marriage, dies in a tragic accident. This misfortune makes Taeko meet again with Keita's biological father, who abandoned them years ago. She begins to consider a new life goal and Jiro reconnects with a woman from her past.
When Kôji Fukada (Tokyo, 1980) heard the 1991 Japanese song Love Life, by Akiko Yano, he knew he wanted to make this film. "Whatever the distance between us, nothing can stop me from loving you," says the song, lyrics that made the Japanese filmmaker think of a mother turning to her son instead of a lover. In an interview with La Vanguardia, Fukada confessed that without this song, the film would not exist: “In fact, I wanted to make the film so that I could hear it in the cinema. I heard it twenty years ago and ever since then I've been thinking about how to make a movie out of it."
The Japanese director affirms that none of his films would exist if it were not for Víctor Erice, since he decided that he wanted to be a film director when he saw The Spirit of the Beehive at the age of fourteen. Love Life, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival, is Fukada's first film to be released on Spanish theaters.
The film reflects on the difficulty people have in leaving people behind, no matter how hard they try. "Our hearts don't work like that. We accumulate what we do, people can't be forgotten and neither can the past," reflects the filmmaker. The characters in Love Life are far from perfect, says Fukada, because that's how people are, imperfect. "I never look for the exemplary protagonist, but for vulnerable people with flaws."
Communication plays an important role in Love Life, either by its presence or by its absence. The characters have a hard time communicating what they feel, so much so that even Jiro has difficulty looking people in the eye. "Everyone has this problem, to a greater or lesser extent, this type of distance with a close person. It is difficult for us to communicate well with those most intimate people," says the director.
Added to this complex communication situation is Keita's biological father, who is deaf. He and Taeko communicate through sign language, a language that the director learned he wanted to include in the film when he went to an international festival for deaf people. "When I started thinking about this film, I didn't imagine any deaf character, but that's when I was inspired and thought that none of my films included sign language," details the filmmaker, who believes that it is a very imaginative language that uses space. and the silences better than the spoken one. "When they communicate with him, it's always looking into his eyes. We don't accidentally do it, it's all a little rougher," concludes Fukada.
