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Inspired by Akiko Yano ’s 1991 ballad of the same name, writer/director Kōji Fukada ’s gentle drama “Love Life” tackles those two very broad subjects (love & life) through the intimate introspection of characters caught up in a complex web of interconnected relationships. Fukada’s melodrama explores how these connections form and fracture—how they’re affected by grief and how distance (emotional & physical) can sometimes be necessary to understand them fully and ourselves.  

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems social workers and relative newlyweds Taeko ( Fumino Kimura , a slow-burn heartbreaker) and Jirō ( Kento Nagayama , devastatingly understated) live an idyllic life raising the precocious Keita (Tetsuta Shimada), her son from a previous marriage, in a modest, sun-filled apartment. Their congenial co-workers help them plan a surprise party for Jirō’s father, Makoto (Tomorô Taguchi). His parents live close enough to them that Taeko can wave from her balcony to her mother-in-law Myoe ( Misuzu Kanno ). Yet underneath the cheeriness of this sunny situation lurks deep-rooted familial tensions, unspoken secrets, growing jealousies, and an impending fissure in their young marriage.

Fukada masterfully teases out these tensions slowly. First, with glances, sometimes shared, sometimes just rendered. Then through casual dialogue laced with subtle, hurtful barbs. And finally, through grand gestures and monologues that reveal unexpressed feelings, misplaced loyalties, unmasked selfishness, and long overdue self-realizations. 

While all of this tension was brewing before the surprise party, which also serves as a celebration for the six-year-old Keita’s recent Othello championship, a mishap involving Jirō’s jilted ex Yamazaki ( Hirona Yamazaki ), an unkind implication that Takeo is “used goods” from Makoto, and, worst of all, a tragic accident involving Keita, brings everything swelling to the surface. The sudden reappearance of Taeko’s first husband, the half-Korean transient Park ( Atom Sunada , wonderfully maddening), who abandoned them years earlier, makes matters even worse.

Deaf and houseless, with a stray cat in tow, Park roars back into Taeko’s life when she is most emotionally volatile. That the two never seemed to have had any real closure remains an open wound for Taeko (and, unbeknownst to her, Jirō’). It is now flayed and exposed for all to see. 

Park disrupts a wake held in a drab, colorless building, his ragged, mustard yellow t-shirt contrasting with everyone’s solemn black. He slaps Taeko in the face; violence erupts as he’s ushered out, and she crashes to the floor, sobbing. This burst of anger—and their shared, guttural wailing—comes as much of a shock as the accident that led to the wake. There is an intimacy the two share through their biological connection to Keita that draws them together and that Jirō cannot fully comprehend.

Acting as his translator, Taeko then begins helping Park receive social aid, at first reluctantly, then later at the encouragement of Jirō. As the two exes spend more time together, Jirō also finds himself drawn back to his ex, Yamazaki, who he similarly abandoned in an emotional limbo when he got with Taeko. All four seem stuck, frozen by their past actions and the people they used to be, unable to fully move on. 

In exploring the intricacies of these uneasy relationships, Fukada utilizes the melodramatic monologue in all its glory. While there can be an artificiality to monologues, the raw and complex contradictions each character contends with are rooted in emotions that never once ring false, and the actors bring an authenticity that transcends treacle. 

These intricacies are further aided by Fukada’s blocking and framing of bodies. At times, characters, filmed in zoomed-out full frames, are separated by the length of a table, a park bench, or a sea of office desks. Sometimes in these moments, a character shares the frame with another without even realizing it. A connection, even within distance. In other scenes on the apartment balcony, in a cramped car, or inside a tiny bathroom, they are acutely aware of each other, Fukada filming in tight medium close-ups and two-shots. The intimacy of the moments is undeniable.

While Taeko and Jirō do return to each other, they must first traverse a great distance emotionally and physically. In the film's final moments, an impressive, almost unbroken shot that follows Taeko and Jirō from their dining room out to the empty street below, Fukada uses both these framing styles to show the current status of the couple’s connection and how much distance between them remains. 

He leaves them and the audience on an uncertain note, contemplating what might come next, as Akiko Yano croons, “Whatever the distance between us, nothing can stop me loving you.”

Now playing in theaters. 

Marya E. Gates

Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and also has an overpriced and underused MFA in Film Production. Other bylines include Moviefone, The Playlist, Crooked Marquee, Nerdist, and Vulture. 

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Film credits.

Love Life (2023)

123 minutes

Fumino Kimura as Taeko Osawa

Kento Nagayama as Jiro Osawa

Atom Sunada as Park

Hirona Yamazaki as Yamazaki

Misuzu Kanno as Akie Osawa

Tomorowo Taguchi as Makoto Osawa

Tetta Shimada as Keita

• Koji Fukada

Cinematographer

• Hideo Yamamoto
• Sylvie Lager
• Olivier Goinard

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‘Love Life’ Review: Encounters in Grief

In this Japanese drama from Koji Fukada, the death of a child alters life for a couple and for the boy’s previously absent father.

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By Ben Kenigsberg

The Japanese writer-director Koji Fukada made his international mark with “Harmonium” (2017). Like that film, “Love Life,” his latest feature, concerns a family shaken up both by an interloper’s arrival and by a sudden tragedy, this time in the reverse order.

Taeko (Fumino Kimura) is raising a 6-year-old son, an Othello board game prodigy named Keita (Tetta Shimada), with her husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama). The arrangement wasn’t Jiro’s original plan: He had been preparing to marry a colleague, but he cheated on her with Taeko and ended up marrying Taeko instead. Taeko was already a mother to Keita, whose father abandoned them. Now Jiro’s parents, especially his dad, scorn Taeko and Keita as not theirs.

Then — in a development that occurs around 20 minutes in, necessitating a spoiler warning — Keita dies while sustaining a concussion in a bathtub accident, after wandering off during a party. (Fukada, who elsewhere favors a placid, unobtrusive visual style, plays the drowning for suspense with an exceptionally cruel slow zoom.)

The death lures back Keita’s absent father, Park (Atom Sunada), a South Korean man who is also deaf, and who, crashing the funeral, immediately hits Taeko before slapping himself. The recriminations, and efforts to downplay recriminations, begin. Taeko can’t forgive Park for leaving, but she also believes he needs her help. Jiro feels guilty for his relative lack of guilt.

It’s more a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character. Part of Fukada’s rationale may be that straightforward catharsis would be too easy. But his drama is facile in other ways, particularly in its use of child endangerment as a device.

Love Life Not rated. In Japanese, Korean and Korean sign language, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters.

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‘Love Life’ Review: Kōji Fukada Hits New Highs with a Terrific Melodrama

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice   Film Festival. Oscilloscope releases the film in select theaters on Friday, August 11.

Inspired by the plaintive 1991 Akiko Yano song of the same name (in which the Japanese singer croons, “Whatever the distance between us, nothing can stop me from loving you”), “Love Life” introduces us to a domestic idyll that it disrupts with a deceptive casualness typical of Fukada’s work. The bloom comes off the rose slowly at first, and then all at once in a single moment of everyday awfulness.

Taeko (Fumino Kimura) lives with her six-year-old son, Keita (Tetta Shimada) — a preternaturally brilliant Othello champion — and her good-looking husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama). The three of them share a cozy, sunlit apartment in a small Japanese city where everyone seems to know each other and get along just great. And yet, throughout the sneaky first act of a film that’s revealed to be rigorously constructed in spite of its informal appearance, little details begin to rub against the surface.

This being a Fukada film, the reaction to the kid’s death is muted to the point of implosion. It’s only when a deaf, homeless, half-Korean man named Park (Atom Sunada) storms into Keita’s colorless funeral in a filthy yellow cardigan and smacks Taeko across the face as she stands beside the open casket that any trace of feeling breaks through. Park, we discover, is the ex-husband who disappeared on Taeko and Keita one day. And Yamazaki? Well, it turns out Jiro was dating her when he fell in love with Taeko, who still doesn’t know that she’s effectively “the other woman” in her own marriage (somewhat hard to believe in a community where everyone seems to know each other’s business).

The unfinished Othello game she keeps on the kitchen table from the day Keita died suggests that Taeko would stay completely still if it were up to her, but the earthquake that rumbles through the apartment one day is a keen reminder that it’s not. Stasis isn’t the answer, and isolation will only make things worse. Not that Taeko’s in-laws seem to care much about that; they take Keita’s death as an excuse to make a long-awaited move to the country, one of several plot details that highlights the relationship between physical and emotional distances in a film that often seems less interested in dramatizing its story than it does in drawing it like a map.

While “Love Life” has its fair share of sharply written heart-to-hearts, many of its most touching moments (and all of its most telling ones) hinge on a certain kind of emotional geography. It’s the way that Park, once unhoused, begins sleeping in the empty apartment across from Taeko and Jiro once the latter’s parents move out of town. It’s the reflections of sunlight that cut across Jiro’s eye-line from across the courtyard, and the way that Taeko is seen speaking to someone just out of frame as the messiness of her feelings spills over the clear borders we’re supposed to dig around them.

“Love Life” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival .

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Review: Striking unusual notes, Japan’s ‘Love Life’ shows an anguished family grappling with woe

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Grief is universal, and yet no two stories about it are alike, a distinction that keeps Koji Fukada’s tender drama “Love Life” unpredictable as it mixes the mundane with the inexplicable, and empathy with alienation, to nuanced, if never fully stirring effect.

Fukada’s fascination with everyday lives upended, hauntingly and revealingly, has served him well when his themes and storytelling align with chilly meticulousness (his Cannes-winning knockout “Harmonium” ). It’s also crumbled when his penchant for archness and ambiguity gets the best of him (2019’s “A Girl Missing”). With “Love Life,” the Japanese filmmaker is still focused on unspoken disconnections that only a shock to the system can expose. But instead of those earlier films’ crime-genre shadings, Fukada now develops the more direct emotional stakes of domestic tragedy, and the sad, strange pathways that emerge from dealing with the unfathomable.

It begins with an air of imminent celebration, as caring mom Taeko (Fumino Kimura), a social worker, decorates the cramped but orderly apartment she shares with husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama), for a dual-purpose party: Keita (Tetta Shimada), Taeko’s bright, friendly son from a previous marriage, has won another board game competition, and Jiro’s dad is turning 65. But there’s a pinched quality to this blended, extended family: Taeko and Keita are clearly more of a team than she and Jiro are, while the husband’s parents (Tomorowo Taguchi and Misuzu Kanno) — who live one building over — exude discomfort with their son’s marriage, even rudely vocalizing their desire for a grandchild of their own.

This strained togetherness is made senseless, however, when hours later, away from the assembled partygoers, Keita dies alone in a scarily believable home accident. (We sense it more than see it, a prudent filmmaking choice.) The paralyzing, guilt-thick sadness that follows is then disturbed at the trance-like funeral by the sudden appearance of the boy’s long-absent father, Park (Atom Sunada), whose violently emotional outburst triggers Taeko’s first full outpouring of tears.

Like a family portrait painted over earlier versions of the same people, “Love Life” holds pieces of information about its characters until their actions reveal, with each scrape of the canvas, defining emotions and motives. With the emergence of Taeko’s ex, who is deaf, half-Korean and homeless, she takes it upon herself to help him get back on his feet, an act of mutual healing that her new husband grasps, but only to a point. Jiro is working out his feelings, too, which involves re-engaging with his own past. Park, meanwhile, is a curious mixture of sensitivity and opacity.

Fukada passes no judgment on how his characters choose to process grief, even relishing the occasional absurdity about it between the pained silences. His casting is spot on, too, especially with Kimura, who’s like a watchmaker with a broken timepiece, charting Taeko’s journey with meaningful precision. But one wishes the writer-director didn’t at times prefer the behavioral left turn to staying in place and exploring a moment. When Taeko tries to preserve her son’s last unfinished game board, even during a minor earthquake, the heart breaks. Other times, Fukada can treat his characters like game pieces themselves: Park’s actions may illuminate who Taeko is now, for instance, but it doesn’t necessarily give us insight into what initially drew these disparate figures together.

Taeko and Jiro’s relationship is much more poignant, and thankfully it’s where Fukada wants to leave us, with Akiko Yano’s plaintive song “Love Life” (the film’s inspiration) a suitably melancholic companion to a closing shot that’s like a short story itself, depicting lives in bittersweet parallel, but at least going in the same direction. Whenever Fukada operates in that space where we can’t necessarily make sense of people but understand them anyway, his movie creates a gently assured, sympathetic hum.

'Love Life'

Not rated In Japanese and Japanese Sign Language, with English subtitles Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes Playing: Opens Aug. 25, Laemmle Monica, West Los Angeles

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'Love Life' Review: Anna Kendrick Looks for Love in All the Familiar Places

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Just when you thought there couldn't possibly be anything left to mine from stories about overly romantic 20-somethings looking for love in New York City, HBO Max comes along with  Love Life , a new TV show starring Anna Kendrick as love-hungry protagonist Darby Carter, which is part of the first wave of original content offered by the nascent streamer.

Love Life  is borderline appalling in its familiarity. Very much a "watch a white woman try to find love in New York City while finding yourself" in the vein of Sex and the City ,  Girls , The Bold Type , and numerous movies, almost every trope imaginable is present and accounted for. You want two best friends of color there to mentor our white heroine through her love rollercoaster? Check and check: Their names are Zoë Chao and  Sasha Compère  and they play Darby's BFFs Sara and Mallory, respectively. You want a withholding mother and lovably daffy dad, both of who are poor role models for strong, stable partners? Check and check, again, as Darby's divorced parents are played by  Hope Davis and James LeGros . Does Darby have some weirdly specific, lucrative job that literally nobody has, especially in the Big Apple? Of course she does — she works in the art world and nearly always employed in her chosen field! Add in a ridiculously #GoalsMaterial apartment and a string of love interests in extremely familiar flavors (down-to-earth intellectual; wealthy entrepreneur; high school fling who could be a new sweetheart; wildly romantic but flaky bad boy...) and I can already feel you bracing for the worst.

And yet, somehow, some way,  Love Life  avoids being a genre-reliant retread or wimpy conglomeration of plot points from better movies or shows. Perhaps that's thanks to co-showrunners  Sam Boyd  ( In A Relationship ) and  Bridget Bedard ( Transparent ,  Ramy ), who have experience on smart, critically well-reviewed projects. Maybe it's down to the writing on all 10 episodes or very keen and enticing table-setting in the pilot directed by Boyd. Maybe  Love Life  is good and watchable because of Kendrick re-teaming with her A Simple Favor director,  Paul Feig , and  Someone Great 's Dan Magnante , all of whom serve in executive producer capacities. Perhaps credit should be equally spread around. Not matter which way you slice it, it's evident from the first seven episodes I was able to screen the team behind and in front of the Love Life  cameras is a shrewd one keen to freshen up a very familiar premise.

First thing's first: Yes, Kendrick is very good as the hero of this piece. The Pitch Perfect  star has always had a way of bringing a sarcastic bite to her performances without it seeming overly affected or try-hard, and this is exactly the case with her performance in  Love Life . As you watch, you begin to see what lies behind the walls Darby has put up around herself through failed relationship after failed relationship after failed tryst, which means Kendrick really has to bring it when expressing those tender, fragile parts of Darby's heart. In this task, Kendrick excels. In this actor's hands, Darby is never grating or silly or wimpy or frustrating. Instead, Darby is immediately recognizable as — at least, in my case — the kind of precocious Millennial 20-something who knows exactly what they want but has absolutely no idea how to get it. Instead, Darby stumbles through the romantic wilderness of New York City, occasionally finding good guys but often finding the wrong guy. Every man Darby takes up with is eerily familiar, whether you've dated a guy like the one she dates or have simply observed from afar, making this  Love Life protagonist's Season 1 arc are the more relatable.

Also, as far as performances go, it would be egregious not to give a major shout-out to Chao, who succeeds above and beyond what we'd expect out of the traditional best friend archetype in this kind of story. As the season progresses, Chao's BFF Sara becomes more and more integral to Darby's story. With every romantic twist Sara endures, Chao's playfulness and soulfulness shines through. Paired onscreen with Kendrick, these two make for a hell of duo.

The twists, turns, and complications which arise as Darby searches for the one person she can settle down with (and luckily, blessedly, the premiere episode gives us a good reason to believe she will succeed in finding "the one") help break with expectations and keep you hooked. The season is cut into chapters, with each episode named after the person Darby is dating or, as we see later in the season, a person whose relationship to Darby is undergoing profound and transformative growing pains which illuminate within Darby a part of herself she needs to work on in order to become the person ready to accept the kind of love we see she deserves. This, in combination with Kendrick anchoring the show in a reliably strong, seemingly effortless performance, makes Love Life  is both a breezy, bingeable watch as well as a worthwhile viewing endeavor.

A note from HBO's press materials teases a vision of more seasons to come, revealing how Love Life  "will follow a different protagonist’s quest for love each season, with each half-hour episode telling the story of one of their relationships." This first season from  Love Life  is a promising start as it takes what we know and freshens it up just enough to keep your finger hovering over the mousepad or remote so you can hit the "Next Episode" button. For these same reasons,  Love Life 's inclusion in the first wave of HBO Max original programming is a smart one. Potential subscribers looking for something comforting and escapist will have a damn good time digging into  Love Life  and current subscribers will feel as if they're stumbling onto a gold nugget of goodness amidst the streamer's vast library of titles.

The first three episodes of Love Life premieres on Wednesday, May 27 on HBO Max. New episodes will then be released every Thursday afterward.

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HBO Max’s ‘Love Life’ Starring Anna Kendrick: TV Review

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“ Love Life ,” the first scripted series for adults to go out on the HBO Max streaming service, is amiable, light, and — flaws aside — easily bingeable. That adds up to more than enough under normal circumstances, but may prove a bit slighter than what it’s being tasked to do as part of the streamer’s launch. 

Anna Kendrick stars as Darby, a young woman whose perfectly rom-com career rise in the art museum and auction-house world in New York City is not, at least for some time, matched by confidence or self-knowledge in her personal life. (That’s a rom-com cliché too, but “Love Life” pushes Darby’s insecurities farther than most.) We follow Darby (with narration provided by Lesley Manville, a warm but unnecessary presence) from her feckless and underemployed youth toward an adulthood marked by a bit more melancholy and a lot more care. It’s a passage of years told, each episode, through a relationship with one significant person in her life. (Magnus, a particularly pernicious partner played by Nick Thune, manspreads over two installments.) 

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When it comes to playing a character who ages nearly a decade over the run of the show, Kendrick manages to convince — aided both by the show’s careful eye for what New York City at the turn of the 2010s looked like as opposed to what it looked like in, say, January 2020 and by Kendrick’s own gifts for manifesting youthful insecurity and a growing sense of worth. And its limning of social types, from the chaotically resentful yet magnetic Magnus to the never-quite-grew-up best friend Sara (Zoë Chao), is effective, too. 

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That both of these characters have complex, knotty relationships with alcohol provides Darby something against which to push back. That’s welcome, given that Darby’s own backstory, highlighted in a flashback episode, threatens to throw the character and the show entirely off. Without spoiling unduly, suffice it to say that high-school-age Darby was both a romantic and a liar, in ways that prompt her to be reactive rather than proactive throughout her adult life — a strange trait for a protagonist. It’s better, perhaps, to see Darby grow and change in response to the great loves of her life than to force upon her a narrative that doesn’t fit. 

In all, “Love Life” is amply watchable, if telling a story that seems not to be demanding its own telling. The Magnus plotline’s sprawl — defying the rules the show itself has set forth — kind of epitomizes this: He’s a character more compelling than anything else onscreen, but his awfulness makes Darby’s ongoing tolerance seem beyond belief, if there weren’t so much time to fill and she weren’t a central character defined by her lack of definition. 

All of which emphasizes the bind the show faces when placed within the context of HBO Max, the strong case it needs to make in a delicate fashion. This series has to help convince viewers who haven’t already been HBO subscribers that the new AT&T-owned service with HBO branding is worth their time. And it also, at least somewhat, must convince existing HBO viewers — ones who’ve watched “Sex and the City” or “Insecure,” both of which occupy similar-though-not-the-same romantic-dramedy turf — that the HBO brand is still an imprimatur of a particular sort of quality.

“Love Life,” carefully-wrought as it is, is an odd show to fulfill that brief. It’s too low-fi to generate the sort of fireworks that, say, “The Morning Show” did for Apple TV Plus at launch (Anna Kendrick’s exposure at present as the star of a Quibi series, a Disney Plus movie, and the on-demand feature “Trolls World Tour” does not necessarily help matters). And it is not quite an HBO show. That network’s tradition of distinctive and handpicked shows is matched, somewhat, in the craft on display. But “Love Life’s” meandering uncertainty about its story leads to a great-looking show wobbly in a way a cabler graded on quality every time would likely force to refine and redefine. As it stands, though, “Love Life” is a piece of content that makes for amiable company and that doesn’t stand out as particularly grievous; as part of a library graded on capacity rather than curation, it fits right in. 

HBO. Ten episodes (eight screened for review).

• Production: Executive producers: Sam Boyd, Bridget Bedard, Paul Feig, Dan Magnante, Anna Kendrick.
• Cast: Anna Kendrick, Zoë Chao , Peter Vack, Sasha Compere, Lesley Manville, Hope Davis, James Le Gros, Jin Ha, Scoot McNairy, Maureen Sebastian, Nadia Quinn, Gus Halper, Nick Thune, Courtney Grosbeck, Griffin Gluck, John Gallagher Jr.

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Season 1 – Love Life

Where to watch, love life — season 1.

Buy Love Life — Season 1 on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Love Life 's first season breezes by on Anna Kendrick's charms, but those looking for a real connection may find its featherweight familiarness frustrating.

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