Love life (English Subs)

Taeko (Fumino Kimura) lives with her husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama) and her six-year-old son Keita (Tetsuda Shimada), from a previous marriage, in a small apartment in the city. Although Jiro's parents live just around the corner, the family bond is not close: the older couple have difficulty with the marriage and wish to have a grandson of their own. When Keita's biological father, who is deaf, resurfaces after a tragic accident, the family becomes even more disorganized. Driven by pain and guilt, Taeko throws herself into helping her old love, which inevitably jeopardizes her relationship with Jiro… Talented director Kôji Fukada once again sheds light on the complexity of human relationships and the difficulty in dealing with great emotions such as love and grief.

‘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.’—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian