Film program note -- Shoplifters

Hirokazu Kore-eda and Shoplifters


　

Q: Don’t you go to school?

A: School is just for poor kids who don’t have a place to study at home.

　

If it’s in a store and no one has bought it yet, it doesn’t yet belong to anyone.

　

　
1.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first feature film, Maborosi (1995) was acclaimed by international critics. The movie is about a happily married woman whose husband inexplicably commits suicide. The young woman is breast-feeding the couple’s son when she learns that her husband was killed walking down the middle of railroad tracks. The man has been obliterated; he has simply vanished. The woman re-marries a fisherman, primarily so that her child will have a father, and moves to a remote fishing village.

Here’s what I remember about the film: it is a very beautifully shot picture and shows a village in which people’s driveways slide down about 30 feet into a turbulent, menacing green-blue sea. The sea is always drowning people. The fishermen live with death in their front yards.

The young woman’s new husband is also a widower. At the end of the movie, the newly married woman watches a funeral procession carrying a corpse to be cremated. The procession walks along the edge of the roiling sea. The protagonist asks her new husband about suicide. The fisherman says that it is like "a will-o-wisp" (maborosi – a trick of the light) – such things lure men away from life.

Maborosi is very mysterious. I misunderstood the picture at time that I first saw it, interpreting the film in light of Antonioni’s L’Avventura, another movie about a mysterious disappearance. The long takes and elegaic silences in the film mislead me into thinking that the picture was remote and metaphysical – I now recognize that the film’s puzzling elements were related to the fact that certain aspects of the movie were semi-documentary. Kore-eda was interested in showing us the ethnology of a remote fishing village and the practices of grief in that place.

In an important sense, Kore-eda’s Shoplifters also reflects the film maker’s commitment to semi-documentary realism. In some respects, Kore-eda’s works remind me of the films made by the Belgian Dardennes brothers, pictures that show low-key dramas in a working class milieu. But we don’t need to cast about in world cinema for precedents for Kore-eda’s signature works. Japanese film is forcefully defined by genres. Kore-eda has made samurai films, metaphysical comedies, erotic pictures, and detective movies – but he is most comfortable ensconced within the so-called Shomingeki genre. Shomingeki (also more correctly Shoshimin-eiga) means "petty bourgeois films", pictures that show family conflict (and the resolution of such conflict) in the context of lower middle class lives. (In Shoplifters, the family members are all poor, but aspire to lead "lower middle class lives.") The great masters of this genre in Japanese film making are Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. Ken Loach (Kes) has always worked within the British equivalent of Shomingeki films – it’s no accident that Kore-eda describes Loach, with Naruse, as one of his most important influences. Kore-eda denies the influence of Ozu – but this is a bit coy and misleading. Ozu was famous for his so-called Tatami shots – that is, putting the lens of his camera about 3 feet off the floor, the perspective or point-of-view of a person sitting on a tatami mat as a guest in a lower middle class home. Notice that the scenes inside the home in Shoplifters are almost uniformly shot Tatami-style.

2.

Kore-eda’s films often incorporate autobiographical elements. Most notably, his acclaimed picture Still Walking (2015) is derived from his own experiences – the movie details an encounter between estranged siblings at the family house where they were raised in the shadow of their mother’s death. Kore-eda says that he drew on his own family for the character portraits in that film.

Kore-eda’s childhood experiences, although undoubtedly somewhat exaggerated, figure in Shoplifters. Kore-eda was born in 1962 and has always lived in Tokyo. His father was badly damaged by World War Two – the man fought in the so-called Kwangtung Army in Manchuria. (The horrific conditions in that warfare are referenced in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.) The Kwangtung army was ultimately encircled by the Russians and, after a bloody siege, surrendered in en masse in August 1945. Kore-eda’s father was sent to a work camp in Siberia as a prisoner-of-war. About a tenth of the 500,000 men captured by the Soviets died of starvation or abuse in Siberia. Kore-eda’s father returned to Japan in the early fifties about more than five years in captivity. He never successfully adjusted to civilian life and worked menial jobs in pachinko (Japanese pinball) parlors – we see the granny in Shoplifters playing pachinko. Kore-eda’s father was addicted to gambling, couldn’t hold a steady job, and seems to have been a bit of a grifter. Whenever the family had surplus money, Kore-eda’s father gambled it away.

Kore-eda’s mother, whom he revered, was a working woman. She was the family’s breadwinner at a time when the mothers in genteel Japanese family’s didn’t work outside the home. Kore-eda describes his mother as being romantic and a great consumer of Hollywood melodramas – she particularly liked Joan Fontaine movies. Kore-eda’s mother was a poor cook and nourished the family on corn tempura, the Japanese equivalent of macaroni and cheese. Kore-eda recalls eating TV dinners with his mother and watching television. He had two older sisters with whom he was not particularly close.

Kore-eda was too poor to own an 8 millimeter camera and so does not count himself as one of the "8 mm" boys, young filmmakers of his generation, more or less akin to directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who cut their teeth making home movies in their garages and backyards. Kore-eda describe his chief influence as television. At the University, he studied media and says he watched 400 to 500 films a year. After graduation, he gravitated toward a documentary collective called "TV-Man Union" and was hired to assist in the production of non-fiction films for broadcast on TV. While working on assigned documentaries, Kore-eda borrowed equipment to make his first personal film, Lessons from a Cow, an account of fourth and fifth-grade agriculture students (the Japanese equivalent of 4H) raising a calf. He made several other documentaries while working at the TV-Man Union, including However... a film about Japanese social welfare and another documentary Without Him about a man dying of HIV-AIDS.

In 1995, Kore-eda directed Maborosi. The film was an immediate success and Kore-eda was invited to direct other fiction feature films. His next movie, however, was another documentary Without Memory (1996), a picture about Alzheimer’s disease. Again, the film had an autobiographical element – a beloved grandfather suffered from dementia when Kore-eda was growing up. As a teenager, he wrote a film-script based on the science fiction picture, Fantastic Voyage (1966), a movie about scientists and a submarine miniaturized so that they could cruise the circulatory system of a dying man. Kore-eda’s variation on this theme was that the miniaturized submarine would be equipped with a device for injecting memories back into his Alzheimers-afflicted grandfather. This concept finds fruition in Kore-eda’s next feature film, After Life (1998). In After Life, bored bureaucrats, all dressed in identical uniforms, interview people to ask them about the memory that they consider "most heavenly". The film is comprised of a series of interview, shot in a very dry and administrative style – these were, in fact, documentary interviews shot for the movie. Interpolated with the interviews are sequences in which the person’s interviewed are shown their memories projected on a large screen. Those who can’t identify a particularly "heavenly" memory simply vanish. Ultimately, it is revealed that the processing station is some kind of "after life" – the persons being interviewed are all dead. I recall that the film was a very strange mixture of extreme rapturous emotion and ultra-dry and colorless bureaucratic scenes, an exceedingly perplexing picture to my eye. (The film seems an expansion of a particularly ecstatic scene in Orson Welles Citizen Kane in which an Mr. Bernstein, played by Everett Sloan confesses that his entire life has been decisively affected by a single instant – a moment when the man saw a beautiful young woman in a white dress on a ferry crossing the Jersey harbor to Manhattan. "I only saw her for one second – but I bet a month hasn’t gone by sine I haven’t thought of that girl," Mr. Bernstein says.) Of all his films, After Life is the most influenced by Ozu – the film contains a number of Ozu-style "pillow shots", that is, empty frames simply showing a still life or a vacant room.

Distance (2001) is about the aftermath of the AUM ricin attacks in the Tokyo subway. Nobody Knows (2004) is a film based on a true story – the mother of four children abandoned them without warning and simply vanished. (This happened in 1998 and was later widely reported in Japanese media). The four children, fearful of being separated by well-meaning authorities, didn’t tell anyone and simply tried to continue their day-to-day existence, hoping against hope that their mother would return. She didn’t return and the little household comprised of young children slowly began to collapse. Ultimately, the smallest child died of malnutrition. I have seen Nobody Knows and, to be perfectly candid, the picture appalled me to the point that I have avoided Kore-eda films since that time – I acknowledge the movie’s technical brilliance and non pareil children actors, but I thought the movie’s atmosphere of despair and imminent doom was too disheartening to be entertaining. Hana (2006) is a samurai film, convincingly made but uncharacteristic for Kore-eda.

After Hana, with one exception all of Kore-eda’s pictures have been about families – that is, Shomingeki "petty bourgeois" films. (The exception is Kore-eda’s icy The Third Murder, a crime picture clearly influenced by the rather brutal and forensic films of that sort produced in South Korea – The Third Murder was released in 2017). Still Walking (2008) shows siblings, long estranged from one another, gathering in their family home for their mother’s funeral. Air Doll (2009) is a fantasy comedy about a lonely man whose sex doll comes to life – a kind of raunchy Pygmalion. In I Wish (2011), two brothers separated by divorce yearn to be re-united. The boys believe that if you make a wish at the moment that two bullet-trains moving in the opposite direction pass one another on adjacent tracks that wish will come true. (This motif occurs in Shoplifters as well.) Like Father Like Son (2013) is about two baby boys switched at birth – the one is raised in elegant luxury, the other lives in a lower middle class household. (This film is very appealing and no less than Steven Spielberg bought the property for remake as a Hollywood picture – but, of course, the film was never produced.) Our Little Sister (2015) is another family picture about grief, a family responding to the death of one of its members. A divorce and father who takes to stalking his ex-wife is the subject of After the Storm (2016). During this decade, Kore-eda also made several documentaries including Letter from Fukushima about the tsunami and compromised nuclear power plant, a horror episode for Kwaidan, a Japanese TV series, and, also, directed a number of shows for a domestic comedy series.

Like Father Like Son won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. Shoplifters (2018) was awarded the prestigious Palm d’Or at Cannes. Cate Blanchett was on the jury that awarded the prize and this recognition was thought to signal a more feminist and family-oriented approach to film making as endorsed by the "Me Too" movement then sweeping the world in light of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misdeeds. Kore-eda is now in post-production of his first film made outside of Japan, The Truth another family drama but featuring Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, and Ethan Hawke – the movie is about an elderly and famous French movie star summoning her children to her bedside for a final reckoning. The picture should be released in 2020.

In his family films, Kore-eda uses a repertory company of actors – in this respect he is similar to Bergman and Fellini. Lily Franky who plays the father in Shoplifters has been in four of Kore-eda’s recent films. Franky, who has another name, admired the band "Franky goes to Hollywood" and chose that for his moniker – he is a best-selling author in Japan. Kirin Kiki who plays the grandmother, Haksue, was in six of Kore-eda’s family dramas – she died in 2018 just a few weeks after the film was completed – Kirin Kiki was 75 and dying of breast cancer when the movie was shot. (She was an eccentric figure, managed her career by fax after her PR man died in 2008, and was often scene motoring around Tokyo in an old battered Citroen).

　

On Shoplifters


"Sometimes its better to choose your own family."
Nobuyo Shibato in Shoplifters

Kore-eda conceived of the film’s plot after reading a newspaper article about Japanese welfare recipients concealing the corpse of a relative and continuing to receive benefits long after that person had died. He toured an orphanage and read Swimmy, a children’s book by Leo Lianni about a enterprising fish that teaches members of his school how to be brave and resourceful when confronting danger. He has said that the focus of the film is the question: "What is a family?" Kore-eda also says that the economic Recession that struck Japan between 2008 and 2012 also motivated him to make the movie.

The film was shot in Arakawa Prefecture in Tokyo, that is, on location using documentary style film technique. The Japanese title of the film is literally "Shoplifting Family."

The characters are:

Osamu (Lily Franky) - the clan’s apparent father;

Nobuyo – the clan’s apparent mother;

Haksue – the grandmother;

Aki – Haksue’s apparent granddaughter (she works in the peep shows)’

Shoto – the eldest son;

Yuri (aka Lin) – the girl who vanishes from her family’s home on February 8.

For the most part, Kore-eda uses an "invisible" camera technique – he doesn’t draw attention to the camera’s location, movement, or compositions. As noted previously, Kore-eda uses tatami perspective in showing the crowded den in which the shoplifters live. In many sequences, Kore-eda uses a style of film-making that was pioneered by Ozu and, later, adopted by other Asian directors including the well-known Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a Chinese film maker. David Bordwell, the dean of American film historians and theorists – he is emeritus at the University of Wisconsin – calls this style Asian Planimetric. In this way of staging a film, the camera shoots actors full-frontal, facing the lens and, then, tends to cut to a 90 degree or profile angle. (Classical American and European film making tends toward diagonal three-quarters view shots). Asian planimetric style uses a backdrop to the figures that it presents that forms a flat plane in these camera angles. This style has a peculiar graphic urgency – it’s a bit like the way comic books are constructed and may reflect the influence of Japanese anime on the film making sensibility. Kore-eda often uses a telephoto lens to flatten the image and make it even more graphically imposing. Generally, Kore-eda doesn’t move the camera except to track figures – for instance, shots tracking the children running in Shoplifting (or the initial sequence showing shoplifting in which "father" and "son" move in tandem). The director tends toward long-takes and is said to create a "contemplative" tone in his films. Kore-eda de-dramatizes his narration – he intentionally chooses inexpressive angles and eschews overly emphatic imagery. Although twice someone says that the waif Yuri is "covered in scars", we don’t see this. The domestic abuse at Yuri’s household that seems to be passed down from husband to wife to the hapless Yuri is represented by off-screen shouting and a single shot in which Yuri’s mother is nursing a bruise and cut to her forehead. When Shoto jumps off the viaduct, we don’t see his body sprawled on the pavement – instead, we see the oranges that he was carrying rolling away from the place where he has fallen. In an important late scene in the film, Shoto asks his "father" whether the family was intentionally fleeing their home and had abandoned him. The camera is in a planimetric orientation to the "father" and "son" who are back to back sleeping together in tight cot – we see them both turned in profile to the plane of the bed. Osamu reluctantly answers "yes" to his "son’s" question, admitting the betrayal. Following the planimetric scheme that Kore-eda is here using, he cuts to frontal shot of Osamu, tight close-up in which Osamu, althour reclining, is facing the camera. We try to puzzle out the expression on his face but can’t decipher it. Then, Kore-eda provides us with the dramatic pay-off – the film cuts to a shot of the snow man that the two made the night before. The snow man is melting and dilapidated – one of its eyes is missing. Kore-eda, accordingly, invests the image of the forlorn snow man with the emotion that is implied, but not shown in the preceding two shots, probably the most important images in the movie.

Shoplifters demonstrates the power of empathy intrinsic in film. The movie is constructed to compel the viewer to empathize with the family of shoplifters. In the initial scene, the camera tracks the "father" and "son" as they steal from the store. Cinema makes viewers complicit – the essence of a crime picture is to induce identification between the spectators in the audience and the characters on screen. If someone is kissed in a movie, we are programmed to identify so closely with the characters shown that we experience the kiss, albeit in a spectral sort of way. Violence and pornography have a similar impact – movies make us assailants, rapists, murderers depending upon the point-of-view established. Of course, our identification with the criminal conduct on-display is provisional and ghostly – nonetheless, films operate on our perceptions and emotions by inducing our close empathy, even identification, with the people shown on screen. Kore-eda works subtly but persistently for the first three-quarters of the movie to make us complicit with the deviance and criminality shown in the film. Because his style is restrained and, even, documentary-like, our sense of identification with the shoplifter "family" is, perhaps, closer than it would if the director used outward and overt techniques to secure our acquiescence with the criminality that we are seeing. In effect, Kore-eda puts us in the stance of the young boy, Shoto, and, also, induces our close empathy with poor, abused Yuri (Lin). The perspective of a child is necessarily limited and Kore-eda, in effect, puts us in the position of the children that he shows in the film – their knowledge is contingent, incomplete, and imperfect. A child only knows what his or her parents (or teachers) profess – the child doesn’t have an independent vantage from which to objectively view events. Similarly, the filmgoer in a dark auditorium, gathered together with others to breathlessly watch the spectacle of giants emoting and acting on the big screen is like a child confronted by enigmatic and elusive adults. We only know what Kore-eda deigns to show us. Thus, we are snared into accepting that the criminality shown by the adults and pervading their lives is normal, beneficent, even, somehow charitable. But in a Brechtian reverse, Kore-eda strips away the illusion. In the last quarter of the film, Shoplifters analytically exposes the true dynamics existing in the "family" – we see that the "family" exists as an instrument of oppression and exploitation.

The manner in which Kore-eda alters our perception of the characters is startling and, even, perhaps, a bit harrowing. The last part of the film reminds me of Nabokov’s Lolita – as readers, we have been so entranced by Humbert Humbert’s self-aggrandizing account of his relationship with Lolita that we have failed to properly understand that the book is about the rape of a child and the destruction of her innocence. Nabokov brings this theme to the fore in the last twenty pages of his book. But, by that time, many readers will have accepted Humbert’s witty and persuasive, if highly distorted, perception for reality. The magic of movies is that our allegiances are fickle and only temporary – for the most of Shoplifters, we are "rooting" for the criminals and sentimentally aligned with them. The terrain radically shifts under foot before the final reversal (a reversal of the reversal) – an image that some critics have argued is one of "bleakest endings" in modern films.

　


A Question
Why does Shoto sacrifice himself? At one point, a kindly shopkeeper, who probably knows that Shoto has been stealing from him for a long time, admonishes the boy to "not make his sister shoplift." It seems that this comment causes Shoto to recognize two things: shoplifting is morally wrong, and Yuri (Lin) is, in fact, his sister whom he must protect. If there is a glimmer of hope in the film, it is illumined by Shoto’s act. Shoto has been taught that shoplifting is fine, not even really theft. He has been raised in an environment of persuasive criminality. But there is something in him that rebels against this petty criminality. Perhaps, as Kant would argue, morality is inscribed as a law within his heart. In any event, Shoto shows more loyalty to his sister than the "family" shows for him. When he is captured by the law, the family abandons him to his fate and tries to escape.

　



Another precursor

In the 1830's, Ikey Solomon was a well-known London "kidsman". A "kidsman" is Victorian underworld argot for a criminal who recruits homeless children for his endeavors. Ikey Solomon is the model for Dickens’ character, Fagin, in Oliver Twist. Fagin, as you may remember, leads a gang of child pickpockets and thieves, among them "the artful Dodger" and Charley Bates. (Nancy is explained to be one of Fagin’s protegees having graduated from petty theft to prostitution.) Dickens conceived of Fagin as a Jewish criminal and, in the book’s first edition, refers to the character as "the Jew" over 200 times. (In a later edition, Dickens removed 180 uses of that appellation.)

In Japanese films, Shoplifters comments on Nagisa Oshima’s Boy (1969). In Boy, a traumatized war veteran enlists his wife and, then, son in a scheme to defraud insurance companies. The wife and boy leap in front of cars, feign injury, and, then, collect insurance settlements. The film explores the dysfunctional family and the child’s escape from sordid reality into fantasy and was highly regarded when it was released. Boy is based on an actual case intensively reported by the Japanese press.