Hirokazu Kore-eda is now an established Cannes heavyweight and he shows why with this complex and nuanced family drama in the classical Japanese style that he has personally extended and modified over 20 years, and on which he has put his own distinctive signature. It is a contemporary view of middle-class, parochial Japan: shrewd, realistic, as clear and untroubled as a glass of cold water. But there is also a strong streak of sentiment, if not sentimentality. (In an interview, he told me that the director he believes he resembles is not Ozu, but the more sentimental and populist Naruse.)
Lily Franky (from Kore-eda’s earlier film Like Father Like Son) plays Osamu, a man with a shifty, wheedling grin. He is effectively the Fagin-like head of an extended family of dodgy types who are all up to no good in their way. This household appears to be a middle-aged husband and wife, a teenage daughter, her kid brother and a grandma – all living together in a cramped apartment rented from an equally dodgy landlord who has to keep changing the names on his properties’ title deeds as part of his tax dodge of “flipping” notional ownership.
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). His wife Noboyu (Sakura Andô) works in a laundry and she too steals things left in clothes’ pockets all the time; she is a very sensuous woman who is still keen on her conjugal rights. The teenage daughter is Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) who brings in her share to the family finances by taking part in a soft-porn peep show in town. Hatsue (played by veteran Japanese character actress Kirin Kiki) is the grandma, an addict of the pachinko slot machines.
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. Impulsively, Osamu decides to take the poor homeless little waif in for a few days. She appears to have marks on her body consistent with abuse and she wets the bed – another classic sign. Osamu’s wicked old heart is evidently melted, and he says that they will keep this little girl, Juri (Miyu Sasaki), and train her up in the ways of shoplifting, which includes making odd little hand gestures to your thief-partner to indicate when and what you intend to steal. And this despite the TV news broadcasts about this little girl going missing.
But it is not just a question of Osamu finding a heartwarming redemption in doing good, nor is it a simple irony in Osamu’s dodgy crook-family fulfilling the function of the social services and the caring state – the state that would disapprove of and indeed prosecute Osamu if they knew what he was up to. The point is that Osamu has, in his cheerfully amoral way, stolen Juri in just the same way as he steals everything else. And it isn’t the first time he’s done it. His ambiguously benevolent abduction of little Juri is part of a larger pattern of concealment that the whole family unit are involved in. Nothing is what it seems. And finally Shota, badly hurt by Juri supplanting him in his dad’s affections, deliberately makes a mess of a shoplifting spree, so that the authorities will catch him and the whole rickety and self-deceiving house of cards will come tumbling down.
It is a movie made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles. It is a beguiling touch when Osamu and Noboyu have sex for the first time in a long while and they languorously recline around afterwards in their tiny flat, stark naked, looking between 10 and 20 years younger: you can imagine them as a young couple. It is another heart-rending moment when the proprietor of a convenience store impassively offers to make Shota a present of the sweets he was going to steal – as long as he doesn’t corrupt little Juri by teaching her these thieving scams that he has seen through long ago. And there is a subsidiary poignancy in this man thinking that young Shota, though only a boy, is now a fully corrupt individual who just has to be written off.
Shoplifters is the story of a group of frightened, damaged people who have made common cause with each other, banded together under the flag of family, under the radar of the law, making the best of things from day to day, until they realise they have been making the worst of things. It is desperately sad when Noboyu says calmly to Osamu that Shota is too good for them. A rich, satisfying film.
