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.

Movie Review: The Third Murder

The Third Murder ** / *****

Directed by: Hirokazu Koreeda.

Written by: Hirokazu Koreeda.

Starring: Masaharu Fukuyama (Shigemori), Kôji Yakusho (Misumi), Shinnosuke Mitsushima (Kawashima Akira), Mikako Ichikawa (Sasabara Itsuki), Izumi Matsuoka (Hattori Akiko), Isao Hashizume (Shigemori Akihisa), Suzu Hirose (Sakie), Hajime Inoue (Ono Minoru), Aju Makita (Shigemori Yuka), Yuki Saitô (Yamanaka Mitsue), Kôtarô Yoshida (Settsu Daisuke).

 

Hirokazu Koreeda is a legitimately great filmmaker – his latest film, Shoplifters, just won the Palme D’or earlier this year (it remains unseen by me at this time) – and he has a string of strong films stretching back 20 years on his resume. For the most part though, his talents lie in documenting the everyday activity of his subjects – they are often in very dramatic situations – the abandoned, homeless kids of Nobody Knows, the switched at birth families in Like Father, Like Son for instance – but Koreeda has never really felt the need to goose up the drama just for the sake of drama. His films take their time, but earn that time with the rewards the reap.

 

All of this is a way to say that the film he made between the wonderful After the Storm and before the Palme winning Shoplifters, called The Third Murder is easily the worst film of his I have seen. Here, Koreeda tries his hand at a courtroom thriller, but for some reason decides to keep everything paced at his normal, but slower pace. This makes the film deadly dull for most of its runtime – and it cannot be saved even with a few strong performances, and a scene late in the film that is striking for the way it shoots the two main characters literally face to face.

 

The movie opens with a murder – where we see Misumi (Kôji Yakusho) bash in the head of his boss with a wrench, and later we’ll learn he burned the body as well. By the time his lawyer, Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama) gets the case, it already seems like a lost cause – Misumi has already confessed, and that’s about that. But the question of motive really does become important in the film – Misumi first says he did it for money, but then changes his story. And this matters a great deal here – because a murder for money is viewed much more harshly than if it was a murder for some reason in the Japanese system. The question of why could literally be the difference between life and death.

 

All of this could have made for a fascinating film – and does, up to the point. The first hour, which basically focuses on Shigemori trying to unravel what happened, and why, is much more interesting than the second half – which is full of courtroom drama, but is also overly repetitive and basically grinds the film to a halt.

 

Koreeda is a legitimately great filmmaker – he is one of the filmmakers who most makes me think of Roger Ebert, who was an early champion of Koreeda for the film Maborsi – and liked many of his films until his death. Whenever I see one of his films, I wonder what Ebert would have made of it. But here, Koreeda tries to do something he normally doesn’t do – and while for certain filmmakers, that could lead to exciting, unexpected results, here it leads to a rather dull life, that has an interesting subject, but feels like its running on half steam the whole time. Still cannot wait to see Shoplifters though.

Movie Review: After the Storm

After the Storm *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Hirokazu Koreeda.   

Written by: Hirokazu Koreeda.

Starring: Hiroshi Abe (Ryota Shinoda), Yōko Maki (Kyoko Shiraishi), Taiyô Yoshizawa (Shingo Shiraishi), Kirin Kiki (Yoshiko Shinoda), Satomi Kobayashi (Chinatsu Shinoda).

 

The films of Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda are always quiet and subtle. He doesn’t seem to have much use for plot, and while he makes films that are essentially family dramas, he doesn’t like big, emotional breakdown scenes either. His films build slowly and quietly – and you don’t always see their cumulative effect until after the film is over. He has been compared to another Japanese master – Yasajiro Ozu – and the comparison works in a number or ways (not in others). Both filmmakers have spent their careers, not making the same film over and over again, but similar films again and again – so similar, and so unconcerned with plot in fact, that they almost start to blend together into one large, quiet work. And I don’t mean that as an insult.

 

His latest, After the Storm, is about a writer – Ryota Shinoda (Hiroshi Abe) – who is unable to deal with the present. He lives in the past, and looks forward to the future, but in the here and now, he’s pretty useless. He wrote and award winning novel 15 years ago – and hasn’t been able to follow it up yet. He works at a low rent detective agency – he says he’s doing research for his novel, although there’s little proof he’s doing that. He’s gotten divorced from Kyoko (Yoko Maki), and now struggles to pay child support for his soon, Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa). Sometimes he takes his partner at the agency, and follows his former wife and son – even on her new dates – which confuses his partner, who says he never mentioned his wife and son before the divorce. One night – it “happens” to be one of the days he has Shingo – he goes to his mother’s house, even though a typhoon is bearing down on them. Kyoko shows up to pick up Shingo, but is essentially trapped there overnight. During the course of the night – essentially the last half of the film – there are a series of quiet talks – essentially between every possible pairing of the four people there. There are no big moments, no big revelations, pledges, promises or tears. And yet, after the storm, things do seem at least slightly different – slightly more optimistic.

 

I liked the second half of the film more than the first. In the first, Koreeda seems slightly more adrift than usual – he has quite a few characters, all of whom have their own personal dramas, that come into contact with Ryota – cheating wives and husbands at the agency, or his shady boss, or his chatty assistant, the high school kid he tries to shakedown, etc. Koreeda excels most when he’s in the plotless moments- like the day Ryota and Shingo spend together before the storm – how Ryota insists on buying his son the “expensive” cleats (he doesn’t really need), then scuffs them to try and get a discount – or when he takes his son to the good burger place, but won’t get himself one (I’m not hungry, he lies to his son). He’s broke – he’s tried to scam money or borrow it from his sister, or find his mother’s secret stash, etc – but he doesn’t want to admit it. The whole second half of the movie – quiet conversations, in which people accept the reality they don’t want to be true, is tremendously moving – and healing.

 

The performances help a great deal of course – none more than Hiroshi Abe as Ryota. There is a way – perhaps an easier way – in which he could have made Ryota into a creepy bad guy – he does after all stalk his ex-wife, and try to steal from his mother, who already lives in a not very nice housing complex. Yet Abe makes him into something sadder – something slightly more pathetic – yet still allows you to see him as a good guy. He’s trying, even if he’s not always sure what he’s trying to do. He is more than ably supported by the two women in the film – Yoko Maki – as his tried ex-wife, who just wants some sense of normalcy in her life, and Kirin Kiki as Ryota’s mother – who both wants him to get back together with his ex, and understands precisely why she won’t (Ryota’s mother stayed with her husband – who was also constantly broke).

 

When I consider the work of Koreeda – and I will admit I haven’t seen them all (apparently, I really need to see After Life and Still Walking – which are among the film people claim are his very best) – I don’t know if I’d consider After the Storm to be among his best. It didn’t hit me quite as hard as the children in peril Nobody Knows, or the childhood swap of Like Father, Like Son – but as an ongoing continuation of everything Koreeda, it is another piece in a wonderful career.

Movie Review: Our Little Sister

Our Little Sister

Directed by: Hirokazu Koreeda.

Screenplay by: Hirokazu Koreeda based on the book by Akimi Yoshida.

Starring: Haruka Ayase (Sachi Kōda), Masami Nagasawa (Yoshino Kōda), Kaho (Chika Kōda), Suzu Hirose (Suzu Asano), Ryo Kase (Sakashita), Kirin Kiki (Fumiyo Kikuchi), Lily Franky (Sen-ichi Fukuda), Jun Fubuki (Sachiko Ninomiya), Shinichi Tsutsumi (Kazuya Shiina), Shinobu Otake (Miyako Sasaki).

 

Hirokazu Koreeda’s Our Little Sister is such a gentle film that it seems at risk of simply blowing away. The film runs more than two hours, and yet has almost no plot, almost no conflict between its characters, despite them dealing with some pretty heavy stuff. It’s a quiet film, a hopeful film and a melancholy film. As a consequence for some of this, the film can feel fairly lightweight – Koreeda has certainly tackled some heavy moral dramas in the past – like the switched at birth drama Like Father, Like Son or the child abandonment drama Nobody Knows, which even then he did without false dramatics and with subtly. Here, he’s abandoned even those weighty moral choices – and instead decided to concentrate on a period of time in the lives of four sisters. It’s a film where nothing much is solved or resolved. It is the type of film that almost feels inconsequential when you are watching it, but sticks in your mind afterwards.

 

The film centers on three sisters, all of whom are in their mid-to-late 20s. 15 years ago, their father left their mother, and they’ve haven’t really had much to do with him since. A few years after that, their mother left them as well – to be raised by their grandmother and Auntie. Now, in the aftermath of their grandmother’s death (which happens before the movie opens), their father has died as well. He leaves behind another daughter – this one only 13 – who now has no one. Her mother has already died, and her stepmother (yes, the father remarried again, and has an infant son) couldn’t care less about her. Now, even though they’ve never met her before, the older sisters invite their half-sister to live with them in the large house their grandmother left them.

 

If you were to make a list of the things you thought you’d see happen in the film, you’d pretty much be wrong on each one. The youngest sister is quiet and respectful – she excels at soccer, makes a few new friends, and develops an awkward teenage romance – it’s hardly the problem child scenario you’d expect. The three older sisters all have love live of their own – the youngest actually has a steady boyfriend, who seems nice, even if he looks silly with his fro – while the oldest is stuck in something with a married man (whose wife has been institutionalized), and the middle daughter has been dumped again – which always throws her life into chaos. Eventually, their mother will arrive, and the conversation there will be awkward and stilted, until she leaves them on their own again.

 

It’s tough to know what to say about a film like Our Little Sister. It so slight and subtle, contains so little of what you would normally consider to be drama, that any accurate description will make it sound boring. While I will admit that the film could have been a little bit shorter – it is far from boring. For one, this is a stunningly beautiful film – tranquil and serene. It’s a subtle film, about life little joys and sorrows, even more than about the large ones. It has a rhythm of its own. It’s certainly not one of the year’s best films – nor even one of Koreeda’s best films. But is a beautiful, subtle, melancholy film that was quietly moving – and sticks with you. On that level, it does everything you could want it to.

Movie Review: Life Father, Like Son

Like Father, Like Son
Directed by: Hirokazu Koreeda.
Written by: Hirokazu Koreeda.
Starring: Masaharu Fukuyama (Ryota Nonomiya), Machiko Ono (Midori Nonomiya), Yôko Maki (Yukari Saiki), Rirî Furankî (Yudai Saiki), Jun Fubuki (Nobuko Nonomiya), Keita Ninomiya (Keita Nonomiya), Shôgen Hwang (Ryusei Saiki), Jun Kunimura (Kazushi Kamiyama), Isao Natsuyagi (Ryosuke Nonomiya).

As a parent, the movie Like Father Like Son represents a nightmare scenario. What if after 6 years of raising a child, you suddenly found out that your child was switched at the hospital – so that the son you thought was yours, was really someone else’s. It is a horrible scenario – and one that if it were true for me, I would never want to find out about. My girls are my girls, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. The film, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda is a well observed film that seems like it’s heading towards some standard issue conflict, but is really deeper than that. The real question of the film is what does it really mean to be a good father. It’s a haunting question, and one that has stayed with me since the end credits rolled in the film.

The setup for Like Father, Like Son may seem a little too obvious. Two families are told that there 6 year old sons are not their biological children. The hospital wants to make things right, and avoid the inevitable lawsuit. The two families – one wealthy, one poor – start hanging out together, and their different values become clear. The rich father, Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama) thinks that perhaps it is possible for him and his wife Midori (Machiko Ono) to raise both boys. After all, they cannot have any more children, and have lots of excess money. The poorer family has three other children, and the father Yudai (Riri Furanki) seems like a perpetual man child – someone who has a lot of dreams of money, but no real follow through.

You probably think you know where the movie is going, but I was surprised by the direction the film took. At first everything feels a little too clichéd – with the rich father being able to give his son everything, except real love. In an early scene his son is an interview for a new school, and makes up a story about the family camping together – something his `cram teacher` told him to say to create an illusion of a close knit family. The poorer father may not be able to give his son all the material things the other father can, but at least his children don’t have to lie to have warm memories of their time with their father.

But as the film moves along, things get more complicated that the initial setup suggests. Ryota is not just the career driven, rich asshole he at first appears to be – and as his childhood snaps into focus, much of his behavior starts to make sense – even if the movie doesn’t excuse that behavior. It’s a credit to the subtle performance by Fukuyama that his Ryota doesn’t sink to the level of pure asshole, even if that’s what much of his behavior suggests.

Koreeda has been compared to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu – and I don’t think any of his films more warrant the comparison than this film. Like Ozu’s best films, it is an intimately observed family drama – a film that in lesser hands could become little more than a sappy melodrama, but in Koreeda’s hands becomes something much deeper and richer. It is a moving film – the final scenes in the movie are heartbreaking and true. Like Father, Like Son is not an easy film for any parent to watch – it really is one of the worst nightmares a parent can go through – and while the film isn’t perfect (the poorer family is seen almost entirely in broad strokes for example) it is still an excellent one. It is one of Koreeda`s best films to date. See it now before the American remake does all the things that this films so scrupulously avoids.