OVP: Shoplifters (2018)

Film: Shoplifters (2018)
Stars: Lily Franky, Sakura Ando, Mayu Matsuoka, Kairi Jo, Miyu Sasaki, Kirin Kiki
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Japan)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

One of the best parts about my annual winter break, where I check out from the world around me for a few days is that I see a lot of movies.  Like, I've probably seen 10 movies in the past three days alone (I've lost count, but it's in that ballpark).  The problem is that I run a blog where I'm supposed to be writing reviews of all of these movies, and whereas I started this vacation behind on that task, I appear destined to end it even further behind.  So I'm goaling myself to get at least one new review of a 2018 movie, out every day until my annual Top 10 lists (the final weekend of January this time).  We're going to start with a film that I've been aware of for months thanks to Cannes, but was still able to be surprised by some of the twists that lay in store throughout an oftentimes difficult-to-watch look at poverty in Tokyo.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around a makeshift group of people who live in a small house in Tokyo.  They consist of three adults, serving as types of parents: Lily's Shibata as "father," Ando's Nobuyo as "mother," and Kiki's Hatsue as "grandma," as well as three "children:" Aki (Matsuoka), Yuri (Sasaki), and Shota (Jo).  Yuri is the most recent edition, a young girl that was taken by the family from an abusive home, essentially kidnapped but with the intent of making her life better.  The family make by day-to-day through shoplifting and various grifts, as well as Nobuyo working a job as a washerwoman.  As the film unfolds, we learn more and more about their living situation, but the writers try to underline that these are generally good people, taking advantage of a system that has almost completely abandoned them.  Nobuyo, for example, is essentially blackmailed out of her job because she makes too high of wages, and because she's trying to protect Yuri from abuse.

As the film progresses, though, young Shota starts to feel a moral quandary regarding the shoplifting, particularly how he's making Yuri (who now goes by Lin because her disappearance has been reported on the news), learn the "family way" and start committing the crime.  As he questions his existence a bit more, we start to see the darker side of the three adults in the film, with them more focused on material gains than we had initially thought, and less altruistically focused on the children whom they are supposed to be caring for.  When Hatsue dies, and is buried in their yard, this is a turning point for Shota, and he gets caught shoplifting, breaking his leg in the process.  Suddenly unmasked, the four remaining family members attempt to abandon Shota when the police catch them.  And here is where all hell breaks loose, as there are a mountain of revelations that happen as a result of this arrest (I wasn't kidding about that spoiler alert).

Whether or not you like Shoplifters will depend on two things-what you think about the messaging of the first half of the film, a quiet, languid look at petty crime & abject poverty.  Here, I wasn't a fan as I felt like there was nothing particularly new said here and the film felt messy in the way it didn't grow any of the characters all-that-much save Shota.  In the second half, I understood why I didn't know more about these characters, which almost made up for the fact that the first half had felt so misleading.  Nobuyo and Shibata we learn are much more than petty criminals; they essentially killed Nobuyo's first husband (they claim in self-defense, but this feels suspect considering how easily they lied the first half of the movie), and that Hatsue was essentially taking bribes from Aki's family to take care of her, rather than doing so in the goodness of her heart.  We also learn that Shota was not so much a runaway as a truly kidnapped child.  Unlike Yuri, we don't get the indication that he was abused so much as Shibata (whose real name is Shota, as he renamed the child after him), desperately wanted a son & Nobuyo couldn't give him one.  As a result, we spend the last half hour of the movie focused on whether or not these are "good" people in a traditional sense, and we are left with the understanding that there may be no such thing.

The back half of the movie works mostly because it's so stunning, you leave thinking about how you truly make assumptions based on someone's station and class.  We are taught in movies that the "poor" people in cinema are always good, but the film questions that by making Nobuyo & Shibata complicated creations.  They are the type of people who would kidnap Yuri to keep her out of an abusive home (we see in the closing moments of the film that the abuse continues, with Yuri neglected in a way she hadn't been with her makeshift family), but we also understand that they're the types of people who would recklessly break the law to get what they want.  Shota silently calling Shibata "dad" after refusing to the entire film at the end, after learning that Shibata had essentially deprived him of a loving family or a normal life felt cloying & like a giant misread to me, but there's definitely some strength in the twist, and particularly the work from Ando is well worth the ticket price for this movie.