Shoplifters

Synopsis: In modern day Tokyo a disparate group of poor people ekes out an existence by any means available to them.

Hirokazu Kore-eda is deservedly highly regarded for his understated, empathetic stories of the lives of ordinary Japanese people. With his latest film Shoplifters, which won the 2018 Palme d'Or, he returns to the margins which provided the material for his international break-out hit Nobody Knows in 2004. Whilst I suspect that the film will resonate most strongly with a Japanese audience familiar with the social context of its story, on the other hand, Shoplifters offers an insight into Japanese manners and mores that Westerners are not likely to otherwise see.

In a setting which in some ways recalls Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths (1957) which was itself based on a social realist play by Maxim Gorky, Kore-eda brings together a group of characters - a man and a woman, a young boy, an older girl and an old lady who live together in a cramped and cluttered bungalow somewhere in Tokyo. Although we initially assume them to be a family, gradually we come to appreciate that they are joined not by blood but by what is a kind of modern-day Dickensian scenario of mutual survival.

The film’s main focus is on Shota (Jyo Kairi), a lad who is schooled in the art of shoplifting by Osamu (Lily Franky) who tells him that only children who can’t study at home have to go to school.  They bring home their booty of instant noodles and other goodies nightly for the family to dine on which they do with slurping relish and hearty cries of appreciation. It’s a relatively well-ordered existence with money coming in from Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) and Osamu’s earnings from their respective jobs at a laundry and building site and the pension of the old lady, Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) helping them to get by. The older girl, Aki (Mayu Matsuoka), who works in some kind of sex parlour, is, I think, Hatsue's step-granddaughter who has led her parents to believe that she is studying in Australia. Wily Hatsue goes along with the fiction so that they will give her money.

One day Osamu and Shota come across a five-year old girl foraging for food in the street and aware that she is physically abused by her mother who has effectively abandoned her, take her home and feed and clean her.  Even when her disappearance becomes a national news story two months later they don’t return her, not for any personal gain (although she does start going on shoplifting expeditions with Shota) but simply because it feels like the right thing for them to do. Their home is actually a supportive and loving environment with Osamu trying to turn them into a real family.  As time goes on (the story takes place over roughly a year) Osamu and Nobuyo lose their jobs and Grandma dies but it is ultimately Shota’s vaguely perceived sense that there is more to life than stealing and grubbing out an existence that breaks the ties that bind the group.

I’ve spent a lot of time relating the story but that is because, rather than cinematography, production values or dramaturgy, that is really the essence of Shoplifters, a film which speaks to us through its quietly compassionate depiction of the lives of its subjects. It is up to us to draw what we will, or can, from it.

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