“They fuck you up, your mum and dad...
During the opening sequence in Hirokazu Kore-eda's extraordinary Shoplifters, young Shibata Shota is about to drop a package of food into his backpack in full view of a clerk when dissolute patriarch Osamu quickly appears from offscreen, successfully blocking the clerk's view of the child's actions. This brief moment of petty-crime synergy feels representative of the film's project, in which that which we should be seeing is hidden from our view. It's fascinating how much happens yet how little of it we see - through the first half of the film, we're coming into things as they've just happened offscreen (e.g. the workplace injury that sidelines Osamu) or as they've happened long before this. The beats that, in another film, could provide tumultuous and full-throated melodrama - kidnapping, abuse, theft, sex work - are instead given the same weight as the mundane, equalized with the day-to-day existence of this family just scraping by.
“The concentration, then, is on how they (Shota, Osamu, mother figure Nobuyo, grandmother Hatsue and teenager Aki) function as a group, as a family, and how they eventually coalesce and absorb a new member - quiet and morose six-year-old Yuri, first found exiled, cold and hungry on a porch while her real parents shriek at each other inside - into their dynamic through patience, generosity and an impressive unflappability. At one point, feeling spurned and at unease with the new living arrangement, Shota runs away, and another film could use that as a fulcrum to spin an entire narrative out of; Osamu, however, affects a knowing attitude of, ‘Well, he'll come back,’ and indeed the thread is resolved not two scenes later. It's astonishingly placid, given the circumstances and social pressures, and Kore-eda wrings maximum charm and emotion from this gentle approach. Yuri responds to this environment positively - the moment around the forty-minute mark where she first smiles is akin to a sunbeam bursting through a blanket of cumulus and shining directly on you - and who wouldn't? If this is indeed his rumination on what makes a family, you couldn't make a much stronger argument for the Shibata family being a loving aspirational goal - a bulwark of security and support guarding against the shit and horror of the real world.
“But everyone has something to hide, and one aspect that ultimately makes Shoplifters feel so emotionally draining is the way Kore-eda, under the surface, was weaponizing that warmth. In retrospect, the avoidance of drama is pointed, less a healthy fallback against a cold world and more a shutting-out, a deliberate ignoring of reality in service to a way of life that was always bound to collapse under lies and economic pressure and loss of employment and the insistent, encroaching summer heat, covering everyone as it does in sweat that stains clothes and hangs like a sin unacknowleged. (Using the lovely scene of the Shibatas at the beach, joyfully splashing in the surf, as the crux of the marketing feels a bit cruel.) As circumstances shift, truths start to spill out and dissolve the bonds we've seen forged, and Shota finds himself questioning whether these people actually have the best in mind for him and Yuri.
“Shoplifters is an ensemble piece, grating equal narrative time to all its family members, and the actors do wonders with Kore-eda's desire to play this as grounded as possible (Sakura Ando gets a beautiful moment where she manages to mine sorrow, grief, apology, self-abasement, relief and release out of a beatific smile, a slight eyebrow twitch and a brightly-delivered ‘Bye’), but the center of the film is where we began, with Shota and Osamu, and it's fitting that the revelation of things deliberately elided about their relationship should lead to other, less savory revelations, combined with Shota's brotherly desire to protect Yuri (‘Don't make your sister do it’), that detonate the placidity. It then follows that we should end there too, and if Kore-eda cut to black on Shota's last line, the idea of ‘family is what you make it’ would be cemented. But the film ends instead one shot later, on a crestfallen Yuri once again exiled outside, playing with aquamarine marbles and staring over the ledge of a balcony into an uncertain, painful future. And suddenly, things aren't so cut and dried. And suddenly, I'm crying.” ~ Steven Carlson
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