Fukada plunges into the heart of the Japanese entertainment industry, orchestrating a tale as delicate as it is subdued on self-possession.
For Koji Fukada, love is always a complicated matter. Just as a foreign body enters the house in Harmonium, the couple falls apart, while Love Life portrayed it as a fragile domestic fiction. Distorted, hindered, or contaminated by an external structure, what Fukada captures, from film to film, is less about romantic passion and more about the social constructs that suffocate it. With Love on Trial, Fukada takes this logic to the extreme: love as a contractual fault. The starting point could have lent itself to satire. Mai, a J-pop idol (played by Kyoko Saito, former member of the Hinatazaka46 idol group) is prosecuted for maintaining a romantic relationship, contradicting the purity image that her employer sells to fans.
Despite the extreme directness of this subject, the Japanese filmmaker never falls into easy acid humor. With the usual restraint and calmness of his direction, he creates a subdued world where violence is always extremely diffuse. However, the film delivers an indisputable critique of the Japanese entertainment industry, but also, more broadly, of a capitalism of emotions where authenticity is only accepted when simulated. Love on Trial goes far beyond just critiquing the idol industry, echoing one of the filmmaker’s most consistent themes: how contemporary structures drain beings of their own experience. Perhaps the most melancholic aspect of the film is the idea that once a feeling is grasped by the norm, it fades away completely.
Love on Trial by Koji Fukada (2h08) with Kyoko Saito, Yuki Kura, Kenjiro Tsuda. In theaters on March 25.
