Movie Review: Shoplifters

Shoplifters **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Hirokazu Koreeda.

Written by: Hirokazu Koreeda.

Starring: Lily Franky (Osamu Shibata), Sakura Andô (Nobuyo Shibata), Mayu Matsuoka (Aki Shibata), Kiki Kilin (Grandmother), Jyo Kairi (Shota Shibata), Miyu Sasaki (Yuri).

 

Throughout his great career, Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda has often explored questions about family and class in his home country. His best films – Nobody Knows, Like Father Like Son – are devastating examinations of what precisely it means to be a family, as well as those on the fringes of society that for the most part are forgotten. Shoplifters, his latest – and Palme D’or winning – film is probably the best work of his career, and the purest distillation of his themes.

 

The movies opens with Osamu (Lily Franky) and his son Shota (Jyo Kairi) is a grocery store, communicating with hand signals, as they are clearly stealing from the store. They are doing this because they are hungry – and there are other mouths to feed at home, and while they can buy some food, they cannot buy enough. On the way home, they see a little girl outside her house – they’ve seen her there before. She’s clearly hungry and dirty, so they bring her home with them for dinner. When they bring her back later that night, she hears her parents arguing – and things turn violent. They won’t return her that night, or any other night. It’s not really kidnapping if you don’t ask for money, right?

 

It’s this kind of moral gray area the entire movie dwells in. The film explores each member of this makeshift family – the father, the day laborer, who has different shoplifting schemes to make money, the mother – Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), who works at the laundry, the Aunt Aki (Mayu Matsuoka), who works doing individual sex shows, but wants a deeper connection with one of her (silent) clients, the grandmother who house they all live in, and whose pension provides the majority of the income, but she still has her ways of making money. And finally, the two kids – Shota, and the newly “adopted” Yuri who become an effective team, even as jealously bubbles up between them.

 

For 90 minutes or so, Shoplifters observes these characters both alone in their pursuits, and together as a makeshift family unit. There are funny scenes, tender scenes – but mostly, a lot of observational scenes that simply allow these characters to exist in front of us. The last half hour of the film shows the consequences of their actions – and shows us inside their world, and the truth behind it. Instead of simplifying things as the movie approaches the climax, it complicates things.

 

Shoplifters is ultimately a beautiful and empathetic film – which presents this family with all its flaws, as real people. The entire cast is excellent – none more so than Sakura Andô, especially near the end when the idea of what makes someone a mother comes up, and her complicated feelings on the matter. It is heartbreaking work – as is the climax of the film, that lets us know that sometimes you cannot go back.

 

Hirokazu Kore-eda is a great filmmaker – he makes quiet films to be sure, but within that quiet is a wealth of human emotional and feeling. Shoplifters is the best film he has ever made – so if you haven’t caught onto to one the best of the new school of humanistic directors, you should check it out. Once you fall for his films, you’ll come back every time.