“Shoplifters” - Hirokazu Koreeda (2018)

Hirokazu Koreeda’s latest film, Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku, 2018), has so far received  unanimous acclaim from film critics the world over [1,2,3 ], and it won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.  Koreeda is a well-established Japanese film auteur who has written, directed, and edited many of his best works (e..g. Nobody Knows, 2004; Still Walking, 2008; Like Father, Like Son, 2013; and After the Storm, 2016).  His films often center around multiple generational aspects of Japanese families, and in fact they often involve a deeper exploration of what it means to be the member of a family.  This is particularly the case with Shoplifters. 

Because of this general focus on familial contexts, Koreeda has often been compared to Japanese film icon Yasujiro Ozu.  And this comparison is reinforced by the fact that Koreeda often employed, like Ozu, straight-on closeups, with the subject looking straight into and speaking directly to the camera.  However, despite these similarities in style and content, Koreeda’s earthy and dynamic presentation conveys, for me, quite a different feeling than Ozu’s more detached and contemplative approach.  Part of this overall mood difference could be attributed to differences in the social milieus considered – the social circumstance of Shoplifters are at the gritty and chaotic lowest economic level, while the social circumstances of most Ozu films are in the more customized middle classes.

The story of Shoplifters revolves around a bottom-class “family” in Tokyo, who somehow manage to get along congenially despite their constant shortage of money to live on.  At the outset of the film, two of the family members come across a little girl on the street who they suspect is the victim of child abuse.  So they decide to take the girl into their home and informally adopt her as a new member of their family.  As we follow the family members about their various mundane activities, we gradually learn, by slow disclosure, more about the makeup of this family.  As far as we can tell early on, the family consists of

• Osamu Shibata (played by Lily Franky).  He is the father, and he works as a construction worker whenever he can find a contractor who will hire him for a short-term assignment.  But in general he seems to show more diligence in shoplifting than in construction working.
   
• Nobuyo (Sakura Ando).  She is Osamu’s wife, and she works in an industrial laundry.  One gets the feeling that it is her warm and expansive personality that holds this family together.
   
• Shota (Kairi Jo).  He is the early teenage son who participates in almost daily shoplifting excursions with his father, Osamu.
   
• Aki (Mayu Matsuoka).   She is a pretty, twentyish young woman who appears at first to be a daughter of Osamu and Nobuyo, but later turns out to be Nobuyo’s half-sister.  At any rate she is definitely a core member of this family.  She works as a stripper at a porno gallery, where individual clients can view her lewd performance through a two-way mirror (differing levels of room illumination mean that the glass partition works as a window in one direction and as a mirror in the opposite direction).
   
• Yuri (Miyu Sasaki).  She is the five- or six-year-old girl who is discovered on the street  by Osamu and Shota coming home from a shoplifting operation, and she is ultimately adopted by the Shibata family.
   
• Hatsue (Kirin Kiki).   She is the grandmother and a key member of the family, because they all live together in her cramped home, and the government pension of her late ex-husband is a principal source of the family’s income. 

There is no single star or protagonist of this film; and there is focalization at times on all of these family members at various points.  The viewer may at times suspect that the film’s narrative focus is on Osamu or Nobuyo, but at other times and towards the end, the narrative focus seems to have shifted to Shota and Yuri.  Overall, we could say that the narrative focus is on the “family” as a whole, as seen through its individual members.

Perhaps what makes Shoplifters an interesting film are its various social themes, which it presents in a lighthearted fashion.  One of those themes concerns honesty and authenticity.  None of the family members is who he or she claims to be, and they all seem to have multiple identities.  Indeed, they are not truly connected by family relationships, as the word ‘family’ is normally understood.  This is all revealed at the end of the film, when one of Shota’s shoplifting acts (perhaps intentionally) goes awry.  At that point they are remanded by the authorities, and the “family” becomes unraveled when their original identities are revealed.

So they are all liars to the outside world, and yet to each other, they are warm and authentic.  They (and perhaps the viewer, too) feel that bad luck and dysfunctional social norms have forced them into lives of petty thievery.  But “reclaiming” basic commodities from big companies in order to have a basic life is, to them, just a matter of getting some basic things that should have been accorded to them anyway.  And to each other, the family members are honest and mutually supportive. 

Another theme concerns what it means to be a family.  Although our “family” in this film is a fraud, they have all chosen to be members of this family.  And it seems that Shota and Yuri get more parental love and concern in this false family than they did in their original families [4]. The film rhetorically asks the question why the government shouldn’t recognize the authenticity and the legality of this kind of family, too?

And a further question also comes to mind.  How is it morally acceptable in a relatively wealthy country that the governing authorities can allow such conditions to exist that even people with ordinary jobs feel compelled to engage in shoplifting?  This is a question that can be asked in many world societies.

This is not to suggest that thievery is actually the right thing to do.  The family members are not fighting off starvation. And indeed children Shota and Yuri seem to have been welcomed into the family by Osamu in part because the two kids can serve as innocent props in connection with his shoplifting capers.  But the family members are not truly bad people, either.  They are just ordinary people looking for ordinary happiness.  But they have slipped into mildly unlawful behavior, because this is what some ordinary people on the lower rungs of society do sometimes.  It is Shota who begins to have moral qualms about his and his family’s behavior.  He perhaps precipitates his family’s downfall in the end because of his burgeoning moral concerns.

In the end, we can perhaps empathize with, if not entirely condone, all the members of the Shibata family and their varying perspectives, which is a strength of Koreeda’s production.  All the acting performances are quite good and natural, particularly that of Sakura Ando as Nobuyo Shibata.  It is she who carries the vital spirit of Shoplifters and its underlying messages.

★★★

Notes:

1. Maggie Lee, “Cannes Film Review: ‘Shoplifters’ (Manbiki Kazoku)”, Variety, (14 May 2018).   
2. Mark Schilling, “‘Shoplifters’: Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or winner is an eloquent look at the human condition”, The Japan Times, (13 June 2018).   
3. Jessica Kiang, “Cannes first look: Shoplifters – a wonky family lament that weaponises Koreeda’s compassion”, Sight & Sound, (19 May 2018).   
4. Although at one point it seems that the self-indulgent Osamu was ready to betray his “son”, Shota.

Hirokazu Koreeda

Films of Hirokazu Koreeda:

• After the Storm - Hirokazu Koreeda (2016)
• Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku) - Hirokazu Koreeda (2018)

“After the Storm” - by Hirokazu Koreeda (2016)

After the Storm (Umi yori mo Mada Fukaku, 2016), a domestic drama written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, is another one of the director’s leisurely examinations of an ordinary (sort of) Japanese family.  In this case the focus of attention is on a fortyish man struggling to hold together his life despite its long, slow downhill slide. 

The man in question, Ryota Shinoda (played by Koreeda favorite Hiroshi Abe), had won a prestigious literary prize with the publication of his debut novel, but that was fifteen years ago.  Since then, Ryota has not written anything and is now impoverished, although he claims to be researching material for his next novel by working as a part-time detective. At some point during this long downslide and before the start of the film, Ryota’s attractive wife, Kyoko Shiraishi (Yoko Maki), apparently got fed up with his irresponsible time-wasting and obtained a divorce.  Now his only brief contact with her is when exercising his once-a-month visiting rights to see their 11-year-old son, Shingo (Taiyô Yoshizawa). 

Since the focalization is mostly on Ryota, we see things from his perspective, which involves problems along four dimensions: writer’s block, lack of money, family breakup, and loss of respect.  At the root of these problems and a significant exacerbating factor, is Ryota’s serious gambling addiction, a trait he seems to have learned or inherited from his recently deceased father.  Whenever Ryota does earn a little money, he immediately blows it all away via gambling losses at the bicycle racetrack.  He is three months behind on his alimony payments and seems to have failed to pay back loans he received from all his friends and relatives.

Nevertheless, Ryota is presented as a nice guy.  Though perpetually somewhat disheveled, he is tall, good-looking, and amiable.  He looks eminently employable.  First impressions are that he seems to deserve better.  But gradually we are exposed to his relentlessly self-centered and irresponsible nature.  His sister (Satomi Kobayashi) is fed up with his failure to pay her back the money that she loans him.  When he goes to visit his mother’s, Yoshiko Shinoda (Kirin Kiki), fourth-floor walk-up condo to pay her a visit after his father’s death, his main goal appears not to be consoling his mother about his father, but searching the condo for things that he can steal and take to the pawnbroker.  He even surreptitiously pilfers some unused lottery tickets while he is there.

Ryota’s job as a private detective turns out not to be as glamourous as one might expect from reading detective fiction.  Ryota’s work is mainly spent surveilling and spying on suspected adulterous spouses.  Ryota’s lackadaisical sense of morality manifests itself here, too, when he covertly tells one unfaithful woman that if she pays him enough money, he will write up a false report and affirm her fidelity to his client.  Thus Ryota is quite willing to use blackmail and double-cross his employer in order to fatten his wallet. 

Ryota also spends some of his detective time spying on his ex-wife in order to see whom she is dating at the moment.  He is disturbed to discover that she is currently seeing an aggressive and wealthy arriviste who seems to have serious intents about hooking up with Kyoko – the man has beaten Ryota to the punch and purchased an expensive baseball glove that their son Shingo wants to have.  Ryota suspects that if Kyoko marries this man, then his once-a-month visitation rights of Shingo will disappear. 

So on his day-long visit with Shingo, Ryota makes a big effort to establish a vital bond with the boy. He spends the day treating Shingo to things and revisiting his own adolescent mischief-making, which Ryota thinks will make Shingo feel closer to his father.  At the end of the day, they go to dine with his mother at her condo, where Kyoko is supposed to come and pick up her son.  But just at that time an earlier forecasted strong typhoon sweeps through Tokyo (the 23rd one of the year, we are told).  With such vicious weather, everyone will have to spend the night at the Yoshiko’s condo, and this gives Ryota a chance to have separate, private moments with both Kyoko and Shingo. 

This is the moment we have been waiting for in this slow-paced film.  After all, the title suggests that there will be a big change “after the storm”.  However, Ryota hasn’t changed or become more enlightened over the course of the film, and the scope of his horizon is still limited by his own selfishness. 

Everything is told in a slow, easygoing manner, with lots of little local-cultural details about this slice of Japanese society offered along the way.  This fits well with the generally good-natured and easygoing natures of all the people on display.  A particularly important secondary character in all of this is Ryota’s mother, Yoshiko.  Like Ryota, Yoshiko is cordial and good-natured almost all the time, but she also has a calculative, selfish side, too.  And she shows no sense of sorrow or bereavement over the recent death of her husband (neither does Ryota).  True, her husband gambled away all the family’s household money, but Yoshiko’s totally nonchalant and callous attitude about her husband’s passing seems odd to me.

In fact I get the impression that the displayed attitudes of Ryota and Yoshiko are intended to be amusing and that we should view After the Storm as a comedy. Ryota is just a perpetually naughty boy, and he is not showing signs of growing up.  In fact his son Shingo seems more mature than he is.  When Ryota spends the day with Shingo, he seems to want to show Shingo his naughty side.  Shingo goes along with it primarily to humor his dad. 

However, this idea of a comedy is not what comes across from reading the early reviews of the film from the Cannes Film Festival.  They mostly praised the film as a genuine slice-of-life depiction of Japanese culture, and they often invoked comparisons to the earlier, and seriously intentioned,  work of Mikio Naruse and Yasujiro Ozu.  Other than the fact that all these films are concerned with Japanese family relations, I don’t see a strong connection.  Ozu’s films, in particular, have more compelling themes to them than After the Storm.

In fact this points to the real problem with After the Storm.  Although the technical production values are strong and the characters are likeable, there is no real narrative development in this film.  What we have is a potentially interesting social fabric that could be the basis for an interesting story, but no such story is forthcoming.  At the end of the film, we are pretty much right where we started. 

Kirin Kiki and Hiroshi Abe also played mother and son in Koreeda’s earlier Still Walking (2008) – but here we are just given a collection of cinematic bits and pieces that dwell on their characters.  For a film to be a truly successful experience, one needs more than interesting characters; one needs their participation in an interesting story.  This is what Ozu, for one, offered to his viewers.
★★½