A mother clutches a child close as they watch a fire burn away all remnants of her past life. She compares her own scars with those that mark the young girl, squeezing her as if to erase the memory of how she got them.
“A real family would never treat you like that,” Nobuyo promises as she clutches Yuri close. Then they pile back into the two-room house they share with four other people, and get cozy. One thing is clear: This is a family, no matter what else we know about them.
It’s moments like this that seem especially poignant in writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters,” which follows a low-income family unit as they bend, play and work the system in order to stitch together some sort of life in modern Japan. Time and again the characters return to the idea of what creates a family -- what past abuses drove them to this life; whether Yuri, the four-year-old they found shivering in the cold should go back to her abusive mother’s house. But each time they do, they seem more resolute that their life, their chosen family, is more secure than any other.
Which is not to say that familial judgements don’t abound and bristle in one way or another. Whether it’s Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) and her coworkers openly wondering about the paternity of their friends baby or Osamu (Lily Franky) reassuring the younger members of the family that what he and Nobuyo have is stronger than sexual attraction, the very notion of what makes a family is openly bandied about.
And, remarkably, Kore-eda does so without any judgement. Calling Yuri’s presence a catalyst for the film’s events almost seems like an overstatement; that’s the beauty of this chosen family: where others are fractured and questioned, theirs seems as solid as the tree in the backyard. Even when the film opens with Osamu teaching his son Shota how to shoplift (as the title suggests, theft supplements the paltry income that the three adults in the household use to keep the family afloat), we see them as a true father and son.
Kore-eda, who has made a name for himself with deeply humanistic filmmaking, perfectly threads just how hard this family has to work to be poor. By never taking the film too deep into the political or social ramifications that got them there, he complicates what we think we know, about this family and relations in general, low-income households, parenthood, even petty theft. There’s societal pressures, to be sure, but by not naming those directly “Shoplifters” becomes all the more affecting.
It’s a lot like the house that holds them all together, which could easily be subverted into something sad. As viewers we can’t ignore the circumstances that prompt them to live there. But the abode is shot with a loving eye, never showing them elbowing for more room even when they can’t seem to get many private moments. The only time they clamor for room is when they peek through the trees on their tiny porch to get a glimpse at the sky lit up by fireworks.
Kore-eda builds a world that challenges this notion of family, gets down and dirty about just what makes it challenging, but he never resorts to melodrama to make his case. And while that doesn’t make this crew immune to the same judgements they turn on others, it certainly deepens the audience’s idea of a family like this.
