Love Life

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.

A gentle, complex film that will pay rewatching.

Isolation, emotional distance and (mis)communication are all on display in Love Life, though these subjects are approached with a disorienting but welcome lightness, underlining the absurdity of family life.

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.

Koji Fukada’s Love Life unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving.

It’s more a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character.

A busy web of interpersonal dynamics, Love Life often feels more concerned about its characters’ storylines and the way they all fit into each other than about what the audience might be getting out of watching it all play out.