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‘Love on Trial’ Review: Koji Fukada Mounts a Low-Impact Defense of a J-Pop Fallen Idol
The star of an all-girl pop act is sued by her management in Koji Fukada's pallid "Love on Trial," a murmured critique of Japanese celebrity culture.
The establishing scenes of “Love on Trial” do a decent job of instantly de-mythologizing this milieu of artifice and shiny surfaces, as we watch the band hustled onto a small stage to perform their synchronized choreography for a mid-sized crowd almost exclusively composed of adult men. Their management — represented by handler Saya (Karata Erika) an ex-idol herself and her distant, perma-sunglassed boss (Kenjiro Tsuda) — are monitoring the girls’ popularity not only as a unit but individually, pitting them against each other with the prospect of more prominent placement dangled as the prize. For such high drama, the stalker attack is shot by “Drive my Car” DP Hidetoshi Shinomiya and cut by editor Sylvie Lager much like the rest of the film, with a minimum of fuss or tension-building dynamism that borders on the bland.
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