Film review

  • Shoplifters

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Manbiki Kazoku

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2018)

    The Japanese title of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner translates literally as ‘Shoplifting Family’ and the second word is at least as important as the first.  Family life and dynamics have been Kore-eda’s priority since Still Walking (2008).  (Perhaps for even longer – I don’t yet know his earlier films.)  By the time he made Our Little Sister (2015), his oeuvre was becoming a series of permutations on the ties and tensions between kin or in extended families.  The stories were consistently engaging but the approach was repetitive, verging on mechanical.  In his next two films, After the Storm (2016) and especially The Third Murder (2017), Kore-eda, while continuing to explore parent-child bonds, was pushing to move beyond the largely domestic settings of his previous work.  Shoplifters is his most successful attempt yet to integrate an abiding interest in personal relationships with appraisal of the outside world that influences his characters’ lives.

    In Like Father, Like Son (2013), Kore-eda considered the relative strength of links between children and their biological versus their de facto parents.  Shoplifters dramatises a similar theme more subtly.  The group at the centre of the story live as a family but are not blood relations.  Osamu (Lily Franky) and his partner Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) live in a poky, frowsty shack in a rundown area of present-day Tokyo, along with twentyish Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) and pre-adolescent Shota (Kairi Jō).  The shack is the property of the elderly Hatsue (Kirin Kiki).  At the start of the story, all the other adults are in work but it’s ‘grandmother’ Hatsue who in effect supports the household through her pension.  It’s not clear when Aki, who works at a hostess club, joined the ménage but Hatsue regularly visits the young woman’s comfortably off parents, to obtain money from them:  Aki’s father is the son of Hatsue’s late ex-husband and his second wife.  It emerges that Osamu and Nobuyo took in Shota as a child when they found him alone in his parents’ car.  Osamu is a part-time construction worker until an ankle injury puts him out of action; Nobuyo has a job in an industrial laundry, until she loses it.  Even before they stop earning, however, they need to find other ways to make ends meet.  So Nobuyo picks pockets at the laundry and Osamu shoplifts.  He has taught Shota his technique and the film opens with the pair of them stealing food from a local store on a winter’s night.  On their way home, they come upon a young girl, freezing cold and apparently hiding.  This is Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), who becomes the latest addition to the unusual family.

    The film moves slowly in its early stages and the shoplifting goes undiscovered for a surprisingly long time.  But Shoplifters builds, through three key events, to potent drama.  Yuri’s disappearance becomes a news story; a work colleague at the laundry recognises the child and in effect blackmails Nobuyo into quitting her job (the colleague gets extra working hours as a result).  When Hatsue dies in her sleep, Osamu and Nobuyo secretly bury her body under the shack:  by not reporting her death, they can continue to draw her pension.  After stealing oranges from a grocery, Shota is pursued by staff from the shop.  The chase ends when he jumps from a bridge, breaks his leg and is taken to hospital.  Subsequent police inquiries bring about the end to Osamu’s and Nobuyo’s household.  Hatsue’s death comes to light.  Yuri is returned to her birth mother.  Shota is taken into care.  To allow Osamu the chance to work, Nobuyo takes the blame for their wrongdoings and goes to prison.  Their offences turn out to be even more serious than we had realised:  years ago, the couple were also responsible for the death of Nobuyo’s abusive husband.

    Kore-eda is too interested in the personalities and interactions of the principals to indulge in easy judgments of them.  Osamu and Nobuyo have abducted youngsters yet raised them in a loving, secure environment that the birth parents of these ‘adopted’ children variously failed to provide.  Neither Shota nor Yuri goes to school; other than giving the boy a few words of sex education, Osamu, as he eventually and ashamedly admits to the authorities, is ill equipped to teach the kids anything but shoplifting.  His moral justification for stealing from stores is that an article on sale doesn’t, until it’s purchased, belong to anyone.  Nobuyo assures Shota that the thefts are harmless so long as shops don’t go out of business as a result.  When one of their usual haunts does just that, it’s an important stage in Shota’s enlightenment and growing misgivings about the life he’s part of, and especially the responsibility he’s given to teach Yuri how to steal.

    Those misgivings are conveyed without undue stress but incisively.  The boy uneasily resists Osamu’s encouragement to see him as his father and Yuri as his sister.  When Osamu breaks into a vehicle in a car park, it not only alarms Shota that this is a different level of theft but also gives him an idea of how Osamu and Nobuyo might have ‘rescued’ him from his parents’ car in the first place.  When he and Osamu visit her in jail, Nobuyo gives Shota the make and registration of the car from which he was taken so that Shota can if he wants try to trace his birth parents.  In the last part of the film, Shota, against the rules of his new, institutional home, extends a day visit to Osamu to an overnight stay.  During the visit, Osamu admits that, when Shota was in hospital, the rest of the family tried but failed to make a quick getaway from Hatsue’s shack in the hope of evading justice:  in other words, the social services officers weren’t wrong when they told Shota that Osamu and Nobuyo were prepared to abandon him.  Just before they part company, Shota tells Osamu that, when he stole the oranges, he wanted to be caught in order to bring things to a head.

    Kore-eda’s clear-eyed but sympathetic attitude towards his main characters extends to minor ones too, although he draws the line at child abuse.  When they take Yuri in, Nobuyo and Hatsue see that the little girl has scars on her body.  (So has Nobuyo herself – one reason why Yuri bonds with her.)  A scene between Yuri and her birth mother, after the child has returned to her, is uncharacteristically harsh and narrow – the mother is emphatically a nasty piece of work.  The film doesn’t, however, have it in for those who mean well even though their actions may cause distress.  The social services people, for example, aren’t presented as rule-bound or inhumane.  Kore-eda achieves something unusual in Shoplifters.  He manages to critique contemporary Japan, specifically the consequences of an unusually prolonged period of economic stagnation, without attaching the blame (as Ken Loach often does) to individual human representatives of social or political malaise.

    As in Like Father, Like Son, Lily Franky is wonderful with the children in the cast.  A difference between Shoplifters and Kore-eda’s other recent films comes in the displays of physical intimacy between Osamu and Nobuyo, achieved remarkably easily and convincingly by Franky and Sakura Ando.   (As might be expected on their low income, the household’s diet consists largely of noodles and they make plenty of noise sucking them from plate to mouth:  in one scene, Osamu and Nobuyo turn this into a kind of comic foreplay.)  Sakura Ando is very affecting when Nobuyo, under police questioning, quietly weeps.  On a rare family day trip, to the seaside, Hatsue has a few moments alone.  She contemplates her aged legs, looks out towards the sea and mouths ‘thank you’ – to the rest of her ‘family’ at the edge of the water, and for her life.  When she next appears on screen, she’s dead.  Though her character is feisty, there are moments in Shoplifters when Kirin Kiki has a soft, almost childlike look.  She died in September 2018, after years of ill health, at the age of seventy-five.  I’m not sure if Kore-eda knew during shooting this would be be Kiki’s swansong.  In retrospect anyway, that seashore moment comes across as the writer-director too saying thanks, to a fine actress who has regularly graced his movies.  The simple dignity of this farewell – a moment in and out of the film – is almost too perfect.  But this viewer shares Kore-eda’s gratitude to Kirin Kiki, and feels grateful to him for expressing it.

    28 November 2018

  • Disobedience

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sebastián Lelio (2017)

    A self-respecting actor with just a single scene will make the most of it and Disobedience opens with a fine example of the phenomenon.   As the elderly Rav Krushka, Anton Lesser delivers a sermon to a North London synagogue congregation.  He does so in high theatrical style before keeling over.  That’s the last we see and hear from the rabbi, who dies in hospital a few days later, but both Lesser and the character he’s playing leave their mark on the film.  The theme of Rav Krushka’s sermon is free will.  He distinguishes three orders of God’s creation – angels, beasts and humans – and stresses the unique capacity of the third group to choose to disobey.  (Not sure this quite takes account of Lucifer but let that pass.)

    The rabbi and his only child Ronit (Rachel Weisz) are estranged.  She now lives and works as a photographer in New York, where she receives a call informing her of her father’s death.  Ronit flies back to London and arrives at the home of childhood friend Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), her late father’s disciple and now expected to take on his role as the synagogue’s spiritual leader.  Ronit is astonished to learn that Dovid has married Esti (Rachel McAdams), who was more than a childhood friend to her.  It emerges that the close relationship between the two young women led to the rupture between Ronit and her father.  On the latter’s advice, Esti chose the path of religious obedience by marrying Dovid, who not only is a respected figure within the local Orthodox Jewish community but also loves Esti.  Although surprised by Ronit’s reappearance, Dovid insists that she stay at his and Esti’s Hendon home in the days leading up to the hesped ceremony that will conclude the funerary rites for Rav Krushka.  As might be expected, Dovid is asking for trouble.  Marital disobedience ensues in the form of a passionate sexual relationship between his wife and Ronit.

    My fault maybe but I didn’t understand several elements of the plot.  Who does Dovid think made contact with Ronit in New York?  In view of the previous relationship between her and Esti, which he seems to have been aware of, does he suspect his wife’s hand in this?  It transpires that Esti was responsible for the New York call although the caller was a man and it seems surprising, within the patriarchal community Sebastián Lelio describes, that Esti would have the authority to arrange this.  Rav Krushka has disinherited Ronit and bequeathed his estate to the synagogue; his daughter is allowed to go to his house to collect the few personal items of hers remaining there, and Esti accompanies her.  It’s there that their feelings for each other resurface, prompted tritely by a piece of evocative music that Ronit plays on a disc-player handily available in her father’s living room.  Soon afterwards, the two women (also asking for trouble) are spotted kissing in a public park.  A complaint is made to the headmistress of the local Jewish school where Esti teaches.  The headmistress summons Esti to her office but this isn’t a private interview:  it takes place in the presence of the couple who made the complaint.  Even though this seems extraordinary, Esti doesn’t mention it when she reports back to Ronit.  The headmistress then relays the complaint to Dovid, whether as Esti’s husband or as heir apparent to Rav Krushka is unclear.

    As things between the three main characters reach crisis point, Ronit makes the decision to return immediately to America and books an evening flight for the same day.  The following morning, she’s sleeping at the airport when Dovid phones to tell her that Esti has disappeared.  Was the original flight cancelled?  Did Ronit, who now hurries back to North London, drop off and miss her plane?  Esti also returns home, to tell Dovid that she’s pregnant but wants her freedom so that their child is able to choose in due course whether or not to live as an Orthodox Jew.   As might be expected in this increasingly melodramatic story, he accedes to Esti’s request in the most public way possible – midway through his eulogy for Rav Krushka at the latter’s hesped, where Dovid also picks up where his late mentor’s sermon left off and declines appointment as the Rav’s successor.  The concluding events seem designed to be as emotionally wrenching as possible but they undermine what have developed as central themes of Disobedience.  If Dovid is so shackled by the rules of his religion, how can he so rapidly assimilate and assent to Esti’s sexuality and her need for independence?  (It’s not suggested that he’s renouncing his fundamental beliefs.)  As Ronit sets off on a second trip to the airport, Esti runs after her cab, which stops so that the two women can have a last embrace and promise to keep in touch.  Given what Esti has gone through to affirm her love for Ronit, why are they so uncertain about a future together?

    Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman premiered at the Berlin festival in February 2017, this film at Toronto six months or so later.  Although both dramas explore LGBT issues, the look and mood of Disobedience are very different from those of its immediate predecessor and tend to the monotonous.  Danny Cohen’s cinematography swathes proceedings in a glum half-light almost regardless of a scene’s location.  Matthew Herbert’s decidedly melancholy score is less varied than the music he wrote for A Fantastic Woman.  As on that film, Lelio co-wrote the screenplay, this time with Rebecca Lenkiewicz (who also shared the writing credit on Ida, with Pawel Pawlikowski).  The source material is a 2006 novel by Naomi Alderman.  Lelio and his main actors make the sex scenes in Disobedience, whether gay or straight, frank and convincing.  The story these sequences are part of is less persuasive.

    Although her beauty and presence make Ronit magnetic, Rachel Weisz’s emotionality, not for the first time, is vague:  you see Ronit is worked up without getting a sense of what specifically she’s thinking or feeling.  Weisz is at something of a disadvantage beside her co-stars in that Lelio shows very little of Ronit’s life in New York.  There’s just a brief photo shoot (for the rest of the film, she might as well be, like Naomi Alderman’s Ronit, a financial analyst) and an even briefer bit of sex (which in retrospect suggests that Ronit is bisexual).  The scenes of Esti and Dovid teaching, respectively, secondary school and yeshiva students are more substantial, showing the couple outside their home but within the settled pattern of lives that Ronit’s return upsets.  (The choice of texts is obviously significant:  Esti’s pupils discuss a scene in Othello focusing on Desdemona’s alleged unfaithfulness, Dovid’s the curious fusion of sensual and spiritual rapture in the Song of Songs.)  Rachel McAdams portrays the pale, secretly intense Esti strongly but the best performance (and the best work I’ve seen from this actor since Junebug back in 2005) comes from Alessandro Nivola.  He realises very well Dovid’s security in his closed world and determination that his wife can be safely contained within it.  His later alternations between quiet reassurance and bursts of anger are startling.  It isn’t Nivola’s fault that Dovid’s conveniently speedy capitulation is so hard to accept.

    24 November 2018

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