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Shoplifters
****
Dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring: Lily Franky, Sakura Ando, Mayu Matsuoka
(Japan, PG, 2018)
Hirokazu Kore-eda has long been long been written about as if he was in the shadow of the great lineage of Japanese directors who specialised in humane, low-key family-based dramas, like Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse. But at this point, he’s been doing it so long and so confidently, he is well and beyond his own thing – “Kore-eda-esque”. Shoplifters, which won the Palme D’or at Cannes earlier this year is the work a master who has reached a certain level – Kore-eda has complete confidence in his writing, directing and way with actors. All that’s left is to enjoy and appreciate the way he constructs his dramas.
And so it is here. Shoplifters tells the story of a family, living in a cramped house in a neighbourhood somewhere in the city. One night in the depths of winter, a father and his son find a girl, Yuri, who appears hungry and cold, and take her back home. They take her back later that night, but realise that her biological parents are abusive and unloving, their arguing audible outside. Impulsively, they decide to just make Yuri part of the family. It’s not long however, until we realise that most of this family – grandma, mum and dad, eldest sister (in her late teens or early 20s) and a son – are patched together through similar methods, with financial sustainability achieved through grandma’s pension, low-paying jobs and low-level thievery (hence the name).
On at least one level, Kore-eda simply wants to ask ‘what is a family?’. But the way he constructs such a question and explores it, is so simple and effortless that one sometimes forgets the amount of craft that must surely go on here in the background. One wonderfully played undercurrent is the reluctance that the youngsters have in calling their respective paternal figures mum and dad, yet the two youngest have no problem calling each other brother and sister. Perhaps it is the fact that both are old enough to remember their ‘old’ parents, but neither has seemingly ever had a sibling before – the arrival of a new member of the family is easier to countenance than the changing of an identity.
One of the hallmarks of Kore-eda’s style is that it’s often so stripped of narrative wroughtness that even when there is a shift in plot or dynamics (as there is here, inevitably given the outsider status of our protagonists), it barely registers as a change in pace. This might sound boring to some, but what it allows Kore-eda to do further is focus on what he does best, which is create wonderfully-realised characters, who feel like living breathing people, with a life outside of his films. And Shoplifters is as fine an example of his abilities as anything else in his career thus far. Track it down!
words Fedor Tot