Mark Reviews Movies: SHOPLIFTERS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 22, 2018

A stunningly humanistic and emotionally resonant examination of family, Shoplifters tells a deceptively simple story that gradually reveals layers upon layers about its characters, their pasts, their relationships, and how, in general, we connect as people. It's an alternately optimistic and heartrending view of humanity, as these characters struggle to get by, by way of whatever connections are available. The alternative is almost too despairing to contemplate. They're together in order to survive, but they're also bonded by the fear of that alternative becoming a reality.

The film comes from writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda, a Japanese filmmaker who typically operates in low-key familial dramas such as this one. Here, he directly contradicts the usual, socially accepted meaning of the word "family," in order to show how some bonds can be stronger than those of mere blood and lineage. This is especially true in a world in which people and society as a whole can officially or unofficially declare certain people as outcasts—leaving them to fend for themselves and judging them when they discover ways to do so that go against the grain.

There's no judgment on Kore-eda's part in this film. He knows better than that. These people, who have nowhere to go and no one to turn to, at least can trust and rely upon each other. If that means breaking society's rules and mores, then so be it. People have to eat. They have to make money. They have to survive, and they have to love and be loved. Not one of us is above such concerns. To look down upon those who must live by and in unorthodox means is to deny their humanity—or, worse, our own.

It all seems so straightforward at first. We meet Osamu (Lily Franky) and the pre-teen Shota (Jyo Kairi) in a Tokyo grocery store. Through a series of silent signals and some clever staging, the boy sneaks some food into his backpack, while the man blocks the sightlines of a couple of employees. Their actions are fast and their methods are elaborate enough for us to recognize that they've been doing this "work" for a while now.

As a reward, Osamu buys them some croquettes from a street vendor. He may be a thief, but there's a philosophy to his stealing. The food in a store, he has explained to Shota, technically doesn't belong to anyone yet. In his mind, it's not stealing if someone doesn't own something. Maybe that's something he tells himself or just the boy in order to justify his crimes. By the end, we're never certain, but also, it doesn't really matter.

On their way home, the two come across a young girl named Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), huddled on the front porch of a house in the freezing cold. She's quiet and unresponsive to Osamu inquires about her family. Fearing for the girl's safety, the man asks Yuri to come with them to their home. His family will feed her, give her a warm place to sleep, and figure out what to do in the morning.

The rest of the family unit includes Osamu's wife Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), the family's maternal grandmother Hatsue (Kirin Kiki), and Nobuyo's younger sister Aki (Mayu Matsuoka). They immediately take to the girl, and although Osamu and Nobuyo try to return Yuri to her home, they overhear her parents arguing. The argument quickly turns to both of them saying that they never wanted the girl in the first place. The scars on Yuri's arms add to the couple's realization: This girl doesn't have and possibly never had a real family or, at least, not one that loved her, and isn't that what really matters?

We get a fine sense of each of these characters as the observational story unfolds. Osamu works construction jobs, but the pay isn't enough to support everyone in the house. Nobuyo works at a laundry, but her wages aren't great, either. Like a lot of the other employees there, she steals whatever valuables customers may have left in their pockets.

Aki makes money at a local peep show, where, in a tender scene that subverts the atmosphere of the place, she meets a young man who might be even lonelier than her. Aki's income belongs to her. That was the deal she made with Hatsue when the grandmother welcomed her to the home. For her part, Hatsue receives a monthly pension, and on the side, she gets money from a married couple, who have some kind of agreement with, as they call her, the wife of the man's father.

There are three major narrative threads here. The first has to do with the family's various efforts to survive. The second is in seeing how each one deals with poverty individually and how the various relationships within the makeshift household function.

Osamu and Nobuyo are in a longtime-sexless marriage, because, as he puts it, they're connected at the heart—not down there. Hatsue is beloved by everyone but especially Aki, who sleeps in her grandmother's bed every night. Shota is jealous of his new unofficial sister, but he eventually begins teaching Yuri the proper way to shoplift—right down to the little gesture he makes with his fingers before swiping something, which she copies with little-sisterly attention to detail. That gesture is the basis for a scene of awful dread, combined with the realization of how deeply connected this brother-and-sister pairing has become, just before the story's climax.

It's not all despair and desperation, though. There are lovely moments here, such as a scene in which the married couple suddenly realizes that there's still passion between them, another in which the family sits outside listening to unseen fireworks, and a one of melancholy joy in which Nobuyo, who has scars of her own, shows Yuri how people who truly love each other show it.

The third thread is more subtle and secretive, gradually revealing itself through clues within dialogue and visuals. There's the way, for example, that Shota refuses to call Osamu "dad," although the man, who understands the hesitation without saying the reason, imagines what it would be like if the boy did. At the house of that other married couple, there's a photo of a familiar face that simultaneously gives us a better sense of one relationship and calls the entire makeup of the household into question.

The truth is eventually revealed, and it's shattering. That's not because it destroys what we thought we knew about this family. It's because that truth only confirms what we do know about them.

Whatever familial relationships they may or may not possess, there's genuine love here, and through a series of interviews, interrogations, and assorted accusations, we see it threatened to the point of destruction (A melting snowman, sitting in the harsh morning light after a short nighttime snowfall, serves as a striking metaphor for how vulnerable and fleeting these bonds are). Shoplifters ends with a single word that breaks the heart and a single look that puts it together again. That's how masterfully nuanced and wholly empathetic Kore-eda's filmmaking is here.

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