************************This review contains spoilers****************************
Family plays an indelible mark in who we are as individuals. A good one can set a person up for life before they ever even leave the womb while being born to bad circumstances can extinguish the light inside you before you ever get the opportunity to shine. You don’t get to choose your family so who you call your kin is totally up to the fates. But what if you could choose your family? What if instead of lineage, family depended on the bonds created between people who desired to be together? And what would the love that creates these types of bonds entail?
That is the question presented to viewers in Shoplifters, the latest film from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda and winner of the Palme d’Or at 2018’s Cannes Film Festival. The film follows an impoverished family in Japan, who steal, as the film’s title implies, in order to make ends meet. Its patriarch Osamu (Lily Franky) works as a day laborer for little pay and lives in a small place with his wife Noboyu (Sakura Andô), her younger sister Aki (Mayu Matsuoka), young son Shota (Kairi Jyo), and grandma Hatsue (Kirin Kiki). While coming home one cold night, Osamu and Shota come across a young girl named Yuri (Miyu Sasaki) by herself outside. Osamu decides to take the girl in for a few days but after Grandma notices marks on her body consistent with abuse, and Osamu and Noboyu overhear the girl’s parents admitting they never wanted her before the father begins beating the mother while attempting to bring her back to her home, they decide to just keep Yuri around. While morally grey, the makeshift family moves forward with their new edition until it slowly becomes clear the moral grey and makeshift nature of the family are both more extensive than we realize.
Shoplifters’ examination of the nature of family is at the center of the film’s story and narrative. As touched upon in this review’s opening, Shoplifters begs the question of: What is family and what is important in building one? The film is rife with morally grey characters, from Osamu having taken in young people with no one to care for them in lives, but not providing them with the things young children need in their lives like schooling or general stability and instead encouraging them to steal or in Aki’s case work in a peep show, to Grandma who takes her deceased husband’s son to earn extra dollars, to even the family’s landlord who regularly changes the names on his properties’ title deeds as part of his scheme to flip houses. As the mystery in the film unfolds, we soon find out that Osamu and Noboyu not only questionably claimed Yuri but Shota as well, among other misdeeds. Despite their misdeeds, the two do provide those in the house with what appears to be healthy, loving relationships and environments that are better than what they came from. As we learn while the film’s story slowly unfolds, Yuri and Shota’s parents don’t even bother filing missing persons reports for their missing children and Aki’s parents are barely any better in showing concern. So, Osamu and Noboyu do provide a loving environment for the young children in their steed, but is it a productive environment?
Osamu teaches the two youngest to shoplift in order to survive and as a result of how they come under his care, avoids sending them to school for a proper education. He and Noboyu’s encouragement of Aki’s job at the peep show despite its effect on her can also be classified as misguided adult supervision. And so that leaves the question of which is better, to be loved and cared for genuinely despite the lack of guidance toward a productive future or to be neglected in total as Yuri, Shota, and Aki were in their previous homes with their biological parents? Shoplifters doesn’t provide an easy answer to this question, instead allowing the audience to ponder it themselves and draw their own conclusions. The young people do seem more happy in their new environments, as being loved and cared for is more important to children in the immediate rather than being prepped for productive adulthood. And indeed, when they are returned to where they came, the stark reality of their brutal pasts and how damaging their birth parents and situations are is made clear. Despite whatever faults Osamu and Noboyu had, I couldn’t help but feel Yuri and Shota may have been better off with them.
Shoplifters is powered by great performances from its ensemble, led by Lily Franky as Osamu whose moral complexity as an individual character serves as the embodiment of the film’s exploration of it. Franky provides a warm performance as a poor father trying to his best by his family the only way he knows how. He provides plenty of emotion and feeling throughout and a sense of realness that shines through. Kirin Kiki brings levity to her performance as the Grandma, adding comedic moments as well as moments of sweetness. Kiki’s appearance is bittersweet; it was her last performance as she died in September. Miyu Sasaki tugs at the heartstrings as young Yuri, providing not only cuteness onscreen, but skillfully portraying Yuri’s innocence and scars of her past through her physical performance, displaying timidness and apprehension you’d expect from a young victim of abuse.
Shoplifters is a touching but serious film that balances the exploration of what family and love mean with moral ambiguity on how we deal with people who do the wrong things for the right reasons. In addition to its moral statements, Shoplifters is a well-crafted mystery by director Hirokazu Kore-eda, with the film’s talented helmer laying cinematic breadcrumbs through dialogue and background material that slowly reveal all is not as it seems with the family at the center of the story. Strong performances from the ensemble cast also serve to make the film’s story emotionally resonant and invests the audience in its outcome. Shoplifters is both thought-provoking and a well done thriller that is one of the year’s best.
Image: GAGA Pictures
