CEAS | “Love Life” Wisconsin Film Festival

Taeko’s second chance at love is going well. Despite the disapproval of her stern in-laws, she, her six-year-old son, and new husband make a happy young family, ensconced in their cozy apartment in coastal Japan. But a sudden tragedy forces her to reconnect with her ex, a deaf, unpredictable Korean man who has been homeless since their breakup.

Writer/director Kōji Fukada (Hospitalite, WFF ‘12, A Girl Missing, WFF ‘20) has crafted a deeply humane, minor-key melodrama that is as wrenching, curious, and rewarding as life itself. “Terrific… an enormously poignant melodrama told at the volume of a broken whisper. A gentle and effervescent watch in spite of its tragic premise” (Indiewire). “It is a movie whose gentleness and sadness coexist with a strange sense of the absurd, preposterous and tasteless new twists that life can give you: a film to remind you, perhaps, of George Bernard Shaw’s dictum: ‘Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.’ It is a rich, varied meal of a film” (The Guardian).

Narrative • Japan, France • 2022 • Korean,
Japanese with English subtitles • 123 MIN
Director: Koji Fukada Cast: Fumino Kimura,
Kento Nagayama, Atom Sunada