love, death and betrayal in Japanese director Kôji Fukada’s surprising latest film

The Japanese director, part of whose filmography we were able to discover in the summer of 2022 as part of Fukada Summercomes back with love-life, his new feature film with a skilful staging, about a family upset by a tragedy. In theaters June 14.

The story begins on a balcony. In a housing estate in a district that we imagine to be on the outskirts of an unnamed Japanese town, Taeko (Fumino Kimura) hangs out laundry while playing Othello, a game in which her young son Keita (Tetta Shimada) excels. On the sports ground at the foot of the building, young adults rehearse a little choreography intended to celebrate the soon-to-be birthday of the father of Jiro (Kento Nagayama), Taeko’s husband.

Taeko and Jiro got married a year earlier, against the will of Jiro’s parents, and especially of the father, Makoto (Tomorowo Taguchi), who does not accept this divorced daughter-in-law, decked out with a child. Jiro’s parents, who live in the building just opposite the young couple, would have preferred that Jiro marry his ex-girlfriend more in line with their criteria, and are waiting for lack of anything better for their son and their daughter-in-law to do them “a grandson of their own”. Thereupon, a young woman arrives in the landscape whom Taeko quickly identifies as her husband’s former girlfriend…

Spectacular turn of events

Kôji Fukada first takes us on a false trail, that of a love story troubled by a few vagaries of life, and by the weight of traditions still alive in Japan. But very quickly, the director creates the surprise with a tragic twist, the content of which must not be disclosed.

The event shifts the film into another register, which takes the protagonists to their most intimate entrenchments, and sheds light on this light chronicle of married and family life in a completely different way. The occurrence of the drama increases tenfold the narrative intensity, exacerbates the feelings, giving the director the leisure to push further the questions posed at the beginning of the film.

Questions that revolve as often in Kôji Fukada’s cinema around the family, love relationships, incommunicability, loneliness, betrayal, mourning: what is love, which circulates here? between different characters in arrhythmia? What makes us get closer, or that we move away from the loved one, that we leave him, or that we stay together? How to communicate? And aren’t we, as his mother-in-law said one evening on the balcony to Taeko, always condemned to loneliness? “even among others” ?

Scholarly staging

Kôji Fukada stages this drama in spaces that he treats like theater sets: behind closed doors in Taeko and Jiro’s cramped apartment, a place of intimacy, which he plays in opposition to the vast and rectilinear buildings that make up the neighborhood where they live.

Fukada has fun with little tricks of staging, such as the stair climbs that he films in full to show us the heaviness of a passage from one world to another, from the outside to the interior, and vice versa, or the cascading lighting, rhythmed like a ballet, of public lighting, which responds to the random flickering of a CD hung on the balcony, buffeted by the wind…

The elements also play their role, as often in Fukada’s films: water, the ocean, or here an earthquake, during which Taeko tries to hold the pieces of a game in place, at the risk of his life… “Watch out for the aftershocks!”, Jiro told him on the phone. Fukada plays with echoes between elements and events, between spoken words and situations, which respond to and illuminate each other by fitting together like a clever construction game.

distances

The film also questions the incommunicability between beings and language, on the contrary once again, through the hearing-impaired character of Park (played by the hearing-impaired actor Atom Sunada), father of Keita and ex-husband of Taeko , with whom the young woman communicates better, more closely in sign language than she does with her new husband, Jiro.

The director also uses the staging to evoke this distance between the characters.“Physical distance is not always equal to emotional distance. But there is still a correspondence. So I tried to show the state of the relationships between the characters by placing them at a certain physical distance, which also shows the evolution of these relations”, explains Kôji Fukada to Franceinfo Culture.

“For me, the starting point of the film is this song, lovelife, with these lyrics that say: No matter how far apart we are, nothing will stop me from loving you.” explains the director. This song, like a choir, enlightens the viewer on the intentions of the film, sketching answers to the questions it offers us.

Between the lines of the dramaturgical framework, Kôji Fukada casts a sharp eye on an ultra-codified Japanese society, which leaves little room for the expression of feelings, on the rigidities of a persistent patriarchal system, on its still complicated relationship with foreigners. , disability, or on social misery, usually little shown. Jury Prize for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2017 with Harmoniumin the Official Selection in 2022 for his diptych Follow me I run away from you, And Ffollow me I follow you, Kôji Fukada confirms with this last very successful feature film the richness and the singularity of his cinematographic palette.

The sheet

Gender : drama
Director: Koji Fukada
Actors : Fumino Kimura, Tomorowo Taguchi, Tetta Shimada
Country : Japan
Duration : 2h 04min
Exit : June 14, 2023
Distributer : Art House Films

Synopsis : Taeko lives with her husband Jiro and her son Keita opposite her in-laws. As she discovers the existence of a former fiancée of her husband, Keita’s biological father resurfaces. This is the beginning of a cruel game of musical chairs, from which no one will emerge unscathed.