She appears to have marks on her body consistent with abuse and she wets the bed: another classic sign. Impulsively, Osamu decides to take the poor homeless little waif in for a few days. One day, coming home on a freezing night after a hard day stealing from supermarkets, Osamu and Shota come across a little girl of perhaps six or seven shivering in the cold. It was her last performance she died in September this year.
Hatsue is wonderfully played by veteran Japanese character actress Kirin Kiki. Hatsue is the grandma, who supports this family with her pension and who also guilt-trips the grownup children of her late husband’s second wife into giving her money, which she mostly pours into pachinko slot machines.
The younger woman is Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) who brings in her share of the family finances by taking part in a soft-porn peep show in town.
His wife, Noboyu (Sakura Andô), works in a hotel laundry and she, too, steals things left in clothes’ pockets all the time. Theoretically a casual labourer on construction sites, Osamu actually makes his money selling the things he steals on daily shoplifting expeditions with his boy, Shota (Kairi Jyo). This household appears to be a middle-aged husband and wife, a teen daughter (or perhaps younger sister to the wife?), a young son and a grandma – all living together in a cramped apartment rented from a suspect landlord who has to keep changing the names on his properties’ title deeds as part of his tax dodge of “flipping” notional ownership. He is effectively the Fagin-like head of an extended family of roguish people all nursing secrets and lies. Lily Franky (from Like Father Like Son) plays Osamu, a man with a shifty, wheedling grin. Watching this, I found myself thinking of the Pink Floyd lyric: “Quiet desperation is the English way …” It’s the Japanese way as well.Ī clear-sighted study of modern Japan … Shoplifters. For all its calm gentleness, the film, which is based on a news story, is devastatingly clear-sighted about modern Japan, its dysfunctions and hypocrisies. This is a brilliant and audacious film, one of his very best, a study of family trauma and fear of poverty, reviving themes from earlier films such as Nobody Knows (2004) and Like Father Like Son (2013).
I Wish is still my favourite Kore-eda film, but, on a second viewing of Shoplifters for its UK release, I can see how the comparison was ungenerous. I admired Shoplifters very much the first time I saw it at the Cannes film festival earlier this year (it was the winner of the Palme d’Or), while also feeling that his masterpiece was still his 2011 film I Wish, which has a pellucid, almost transcendental simplicity that Shoplifters didn’t quite have. Its significant plot shifts happen unobtrusively, almost invisibly, except for those big, heart-wrenching revelations in its final section. In fact, it is another of the intricate and nuanced family dramas in the classical Japanese style, of which Kore-eda has made himself a modern master. Yet the film is nothing like that generically. H irokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters is a complex, subtle, mysterious film that builds to the most extraordinary surprise ending, a twist-reveal worthy of psychological suspense noir.
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