Love My Life illustrates how the clichés of the teen romance can make a potentially daring movie seem commonplace.
Ichiko is in love, possibly seriously, but it is with a woman Eri. She brings her home to meet her father, much to his surprise. But he adjusts very well, and tells her that her mother was actually a lesbian as well, who married him because she wanted a child. Then for good measure he tells her he is gay as well, so all’s well on that front.
Ichiko is a university student, and her best friend is gay. He is debating about coming out, which is the only serious problem with homosexuality we encounter. Eri is hesitant as well. We assume it is parental opposition, since she is still a student and needs her tuition money as well, but when we meet her father we find that it is something else entirely, She wants to be lawyer, primarily to spite her father who thinks she is only a girl and doesn’t need a career.
The crisis comes when Eri decides to go into lockdown mode to study for her law exams. We’ve seen this dozens of times in Japanese movies, for the various exams are make-or-break in the Japanese system, but Ichiko is heartbroken, because she is madly in love and can’t understand how she could be a distraction. But all comes right in the end.
How much Japanese society is coming to accept homosexuality is something that is essentially a case-by-case, family by family situation, but Ichiko seems to operate in a risk free zone. And in the meanwhile, we get pretty much all the clichés of the teen romance movie
– the romp on the beach, the shopping spree, the temporary attraction to another woman, the desperate run to meet the lover. Father couldn’t be more perfect, even finding her a job as a translator with a publisher.
It is a temptation, of course, to see homosexual relations only through the lens of the homosexuality, rather than to see the love story, and that may be the intention here. Love My Life was based on a manga, which may have been popular simply because it depicted the unusual as perfectly normal. Certainly there is no exploitation involved, no chance to look at two naked women in torrid sex scenes. This is not a version of Blue is the Warmest Color.
And that is really the way I think the intention was, to simply make a love story that happens to include two women. Much is made of Elton John’s civil union in 2005, which the characters call a marriage, as an example of what is possible, but most of all it is just the story of Ichiko falling in love.
Koji Kawano directs his first feature film in the time-honored way of independent Japanese film-making – lots of ambient sound with location shooting, even in the apartments, street scenes with the passersby unaware they are being filmed – and a tendency to take more time than is necessary on individual scenes. Ichiko’s run is apparently across all of Tokyo, it takes so long.
It is a remarkable movie for what it is not, a “coming out of the closet” movie that seems to have no risk in coming out. Perhaps that is reality, that things have moved on since the days of Maison de Himiko. Even that film featured a gay students club, so perhaps things are simpler now, at least in university circles. And Japan has never outlawed homosexuality, so perhaps it is not really the issue in society that we expect it to be. It is 2006, after all. But because we hit so many of the clichés of the students in love movie, it seems duller than it should.
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