Shoplifters

Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters ends with young Yuri alone on a balcony with her toys tossed to the side and her expression lifeless and defeated as she peeks through the balcony coverings and uses a step to look out and past at something the camera cannot show us. The last shot holds on her face, turned slightly toward us, looking at a distance the film has spent its entire runtime making feel real and then taking away. It reminded me of the final image of * A Brighter Summer Day,* Xiao Si's mother holding up her son's uniform, mourning the past and mourning her own failures alongside society's, and the two shots sit together in my memory as among the most devastating endings in cinema. What is Yuri thinking as she looks out from that balcony? Whether she is mourning, or hoping, or simply suspended in the absence of everyone who once filled her life, Kore-eda leaves the question open, and the openness of it is what makes the shot so unbearable. The third act of Shoplifters is a sudden collapse, a deconstruction of everything the film has been carefully building. The family the film spent an hour and a half constructing is dismantled by the very laws and institutions that were supposed to protect the people inside it, and Kore-eda uses this dismantling to ask something the film has been circling from its first scene. Can people who break laws, who steal and deceive and bend every moral code available to them, be genuinely good and loving people? The family in Shoplifters shoplifts instant ramen, shampoo, and other items of basic need, and justifies this by telling themselves that things not yet sold have no owner. The moral code is flawed and they know it, and it unravels further as the film progresses into acts of thievery and worse. Yet these same characters in some ways are among the most loving people in the society Kore-eda depicts, and the gap between their warped morality and their genuine warmth is where the film lives. "I don't know anything else to teach them," the father Osamu says when asked why he taught the children to shoplift. The city outside the family's cramped shack is clean and raging and indifferent, and the contrast between that world and the one these characters inhabit pervades every frame. Kore-eda has said in interviews that he wanted to study the relationship between family and society, and Shoplifters shows not only the economic failures of Japan's Lost Decades but how the laws of a society can do more harm to the people they claim to protect than the crimes those people commit to survive. The film's understanding of alienation and of the capitalistic system of production that makes workers strangers to what they produce and to each other, runs beneath every scene of people existing together in the only space the world has left them. What the film is really asking is what a family is, and whether the answer has anything to do with blood. Grandma Hatsue warns early that this chosen bond cannot last, but the beach scene, the family together in the sun, her whispered thank you directed at no one in particular and at all of them at once, suggests otherwise. Yuri's biological parents wanted to abort her and then abused her when she arrived. When someone tells Nobuyo that children need their mothers, she asks: "Giving birth automatically makes you a mother?" Shoplifters spends its entire runtime answering that question, and the answer is visible in every shared meal and every moment of tenderness between people the law would never recognize as family. The children resist calling the adults mom and dad, and yet by the time the third act comes and the institutions of society come to take it apart, the viewer understands what it was, and what the loss means, better than any of the characters can say. 89 Story & Pacing: 16/20 Characters & Acting: 18/20 Themes: 45/50 Cinematography & Editing: 5/5 Soundtrack & Sound: 4/5 Memorability: 1/1