Koji Fukada’s film “Private Life” was released in Russian distribution. Review

The melodrama Love Life by Koji Fukada premiered last year at the Venice Film Festival. The Japanese director guides the viewer through an exploration of grief and loss with amazing care, allowing them to keep hope alive. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

The original title of the film is “Love Life” in English, as is the sentimental ditty of New York-based Japanese singer Akiko Yano. Koji Fukada heard it back in 1991, and for more than twenty years it did not go out of his head, until it was embodied in a story on the screen, which he directed according to his own script. In the picture, the song will only play at the very end, and its words may seem like a common pop platitude, sung, written and said a thousand times: “Whatever the distance between us, I will still love you.” However, Fukada fills this cliche with meaning, colors it with emotions, which, in turn, have been lived by thousands of people thousands of times, but this does not become less real. And it is precisely the distance between lovers and loved ones – sometimes literal, measured in kilometers, sometimes allegorical, but keenly felt by those who live in a small cramped apartment, without feeling emotional closeness – becomes the main theme of the film.

It all starts deceptively serene. It’s a wonderful day, a typical residential area of ​​an unnamed Japanese city, on one of the balconies casts sunbeams CD-ROM, hanging on a string to scare away pigeons, but more for good luck. Taeko (Fumino Kimura) lives in this apartment with her six-year-old son Keita (Tetta Shimada), a quick-witted boy who is a reversi champion and husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama). The husband’s parents live in the same apartment in the same building across the street, and like in the days before cell phones, in the morning Taeko calls out to her mother-in-law (Marika Yamakawa) across the yard. On this day, everyone is preparing for a family holiday, and in the yard, colleagues Taeko and Jiro (they all work at the center for social assistance to the homeless) are rehearsing congratulations with balloons.

But almost immediately, notes of tension appear in this idyllic picture. So, in the company of colleagues, the ex-girlfriend of Jiro Yamazaki (Hirona Yamazaki) is found – Taeko does not know about their past relationship. And the relationship with her husband’s parents is not at all so peaceful: Keita is the son of Taeko from his first marriage, and the father of Jiro (Tomorovo Taguchi) even a year after the wedding did not accept the fact that his son married a woman who already has a child. The mother-in-law tries to smooth over this conflict, and everyone celebrates the patriarch’s birthday together, when the fun ends in tragedy: Keita, who has played too much, falls into a bathtub filled with water and dies, hitting his head and choking, while adults a couple of meters from him sing karaoke.

The common grief that could unite the family splits it even more. Jiro’s parents hastily move out of town (no, no, they say, this is not connected in any way, they have been planning this for a long time), and Taeko and Jiro simply cannot find words to talk to each other, and in their apartment, which has remained the same bright, but now filled with cold, silence hangs. In addition, Keita’s father Pak (Atom Sunada) appears, and Taeko reaches out to him as the only one who is able to understand her, despite the fact that he once left her with a child alone, and when he returns, he first of all blames her for what happened and makes an ugly scene at the funeral. But his anger and anger, ugly as it is, better conveys her own feelings than everyone else’s reserved ritual condolences.

Taeko’s closeness to her first husband and her estrangement from Jiro is underlined by an important detail: since her first husband is a deaf-and-dumb immigrant from Korea, she speaks to him in a sign language that no one around her understands, and thus the two of them find themselves in their own world. Also, Park is homeless, and Taeko rushes to help him, as if, having lost her son, she wants to regain her motherly role, taking care of a grown man. Jiro is jealous, of course, but “Private Life” is not a love triangle or quadrilateral story, given Yamazaki’s brief reappearance. This is a story about loneliness and the different forms that grief takes, and about the fact that you can live on without forgetting the past and without closing the door behind it. Sometimes it is the acceptance that the shadow of this past will forever remain in the present that helps to see the light again.