‘Love Life’ tells a meandering story about grief

There are particular phrases that come up quite a bit in critiques of the work of Koji Fukada: ambiguous, enigmatic, irritating. As a filmmaker, he couldn’t be accused of taking the straightforward possibility; this can be a man who thinks nothing of casting an honest-to-God android in a lead function (see 2015’s “Sayonara”), or making a four-hour deconstructed rom-com (2020’s “The Actual Factor”).

Even at their most easy, Fukada’s movies are stuffed with narrative detours and lifeless ends, with a tone that may veer out of the blue from naturalistic drama into broad comedy or theatrical artifice. There’s been a degree in most of them the place I’ve sat again and thought, “OK, the place are you going with all this?”