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
