In Tokyo, a non-biological family inhabits a derelict house amidst abject poverty. Former day labourer Osamu (Lily Franky), his laundry service worker wife Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) and elderly widow Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) are the main breadwinners, but Hatsue manages this with her late husband's pension and Osamu does it by shoplifting. Into this he has also roped their two children, both illegally adopted: hostess Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) and much younger Shota (Kairi Jo). Osamu and Shota have patented a special mode of hand signals to pull their thievery off, and it usually works. But all is not so peachy at home, particularly when Osamu and Nobuyo choose to take in Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), a girl of Shota's age with a family life suspicious in different ways. After they learn of a police investigation into Yuri's disappearance, they give her a new identity, wardrobe and haircut. Then after Shota has a moral conflict during a car theft, a very precarious series events result in him being hospitalised and then arrested. This predicament puts the "family"s very union and welfare in great jeopardy.
Writer, director and even editor Hirokazi Kore-eda won the 2018 Palme d'Or at Cannes for Shoplifters and that's usually a result that makes my ears prick up, but honestly I don't know how I feel about this film. It's certainly universal in its central themes - poverty, family and desperation - but at some point, my attention faltered as there are several stretches of it that I found just too self-contained to be fully compelling. Intimacy in art can be deeply affecting, but as this is a tale of a so-called family at odds with their immediate surroundings, as opposed to just one character in that boat, I found it often to be too intimate. I think Kore-eda could've achieved a more engaging result without shifting thematic focus by doing it as interlocking stories with several such families (related or not).
Nonetheless, Shoplifters does provide quite a lucid and objective snapshot of modern-day urban Japan from the lowest street level, beyond the bright and cheery world of J-Pop, anime, video games and IT which I think so many of us Westerners now define Japan as. Kore-eda also draws very natural performances from his cast, especially Kiki and Jo. I didn't hate Shoplifters at all, and maybe it just needs several viewings for me to truly embrace it. But it's a movie with a story I just would have told quite differently.
Writer, director and even editor Hirokazi Kore-eda won the 2018 Palme d'Or at Cannes for Shoplifters and that's usually a result that makes my ears prick up, but honestly I don't know how I feel about this film. It's certainly universal in its central themes - poverty, family and desperation - but at some point, my attention faltered as there are several stretches of it that I found just too self-contained to be fully compelling. Intimacy in art can be deeply affecting, but as this is a tale of a so-called family at odds with their immediate surroundings, as opposed to just one character in that boat, I found it often to be too intimate. I think Kore-eda could've achieved a more engaging result without shifting thematic focus by doing it as interlocking stories with several such families (related or not).
Nonetheless, Shoplifters does provide quite a lucid and objective snapshot of modern-day urban Japan from the lowest street level, beyond the bright and cheery world of J-Pop, anime, video games and IT which I think so many of us Westerners now define Japan as. Kore-eda also draws very natural performances from his cast, especially Kiki and Jo. I didn't hate Shoplifters at all, and maybe it just needs several viewings for me to truly embrace it. But it's a movie with a story I just would have told quite differently.
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