Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku, 万引き家族), or the death of the Tooth Fairy
We know very well that poor families suffer winter more than any other, yearning, whilst their bones splinter, the warm breeze of a summer morning. We know, as well, that when the sun and humidity arrive, these same families perspire and suffocate, seeking shade and shelter among deteriorated housing units that, paradoxically, end up amplifying the feeling of asphyxia. It is, of course, the triumph of the will of the paupers, who offer in exchange for a truce, without hesitating, the gradual mutilation of all sensual refinement that demands indistinctly a certain temperance; we are talking about the most quotidian representation of the conquest of physical resistance, facing the warning of all contraindications. If is decided to present such a story on the big screen, there is no denying that it'd be considered a universal one. However, the fact that it is located between those coordinates does not ensure, by default, that it will come to fruition succesfully. Addressing a colossal challenge like this, demands a distinguished sensitivity in the narrative disposition of its script and, necessarily, an impeccable direction; that is, the satisfactory achievement of an intricate project that demonstrates full mastery in the use and handling of specific audiovisual poetics. But how far can this poetics go? Possibly, as far as what was achieved by Hirokazu Kore-eda in his latest film. Shoplifters (2018), or Manbiki Kazoku (万 引 き 家族), which translates directly to Shoplifting Family, is a jewel of hylemorphic cohesion, a risky gamble, which adds to the endless debate on the human question. It is about the film technique at the service of an impossible story, as impossible as life and the contradictions that abound in the heart of our modern societies.
With the new motion picture of Kore-eda, we are witnessing a story of extreme delicacy, which makes us forget at times, through characters so fascinatingly portrayed, either by their singular histrionic charm or by the unstoppable dynamic of the acting ensemble, that the best intentions are always measured by their consequences and collateral damages. What is trully problematic comes from the careful consideration of the principles of its characters, particularly those presented by the ones who are adults (Lily Franky, Andô Sakura, Kiki Kirin), because, even though condemned socially, they raise a lot of questions about our own conception of what exactly does a family is and mean. This is, possibly, the most lethal weapon that Kore-eda has to tear the hearts of his audience. We will return later on this point.
Lily Franky and Jyo Kairi in Shoplifters (2018), a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
To sum up, the winner of the Palme d'Or 2018, tells the story of a family of low-level crooks. Initially, that of a couple of thieves: firstly, a middle-aged man, Osamu Shibata (brilliantly played by Lily Franky), who has developed a fugacious shoplifting technique with his son Shota (Jyo Kairi), as exquisitely demonstrates the inaugural scene, and the second, his partner, Nobuyo Shibata (Andô Sakura), who steals valuables from the garments that the clients of the hotel, where she’s employed, send to the laundry. This couple lives with Nobuyo's sister, Aki (Matsuoka Mayu), who contributes to the family cause by working —with the sweat of her body— in a tempered-futuristic-japanese-style sex-service establishment (MVM, murderer of virgin men). They coexist at the home of Grandma Hatsue (Kiki Kirin), mother of both women. The old lady, with full awareness of the conduct of her family, takes care and supports the household through the government checks received due the pension of her late husband. Albeit affective and patient, from the beginning we are allowed to see that the old woman reserves something that others do not know (parapraxis as self-disclosure). Through a certain simulation of a smile and a melancholic stare, it is connected, in Hatsue's expression, the imminence of the family's collapse during the beginning, with its effective downfall in the epilogue. In this context, comes the appearance of Yuri (Sasaki Miyu), who is rescued by Shota, his new brother, and his father, Osamu. They find her abandoned and hungry in the street, outside her home, while her parents, inside, melt into the vilest, but credible, outbursts of domestic violence (which, as the film later reveals, even reached the little girl causing her considerable injuries). It is a clear example, perhaps already cliché, of the poor who reaches out to help the poorest, of the hungry who sacrifice the only morsel to give it to another believed to be in more need. The girl, although at the beginning with some resistance, is welcome in her new home. After the somewhat distrustful looks of her new mother, Nobuyo, and Shota's jealousy, she is organically assimilated by a family logic that even tries to initiate her on their criminal ventures. On this base, the story is triggered.
What comes in the middle is a recrudescence of the harsh and ambivalent sensations that are thrown towards the spectator facing the events unfold. The characters go from mere cartoons to the nervousness that always accompanies the process of cracking an imposter. And we watch, then, how the narrative oscillates with violence between polarized extremes, namely, from the kidnapping of a girl to her warm acceptance within the household of the abductors, which is capable of making her feel, for the first time, determined, respected and loved; from frigidity to indulgence, from anonymity to intimate consideration of a stranger, from the dream of living in a new house with your family to the humbled recognition that your child can be lost joking about an expensive hammer... from living miserably to die incognitably. Bury me in the yard under the tiny pond.
Andô Sakura, Sasaki Miyu, Matsuoka Mayu, Lily Franky, Kiki Kirin and Jyo Kairi in Shoplifters (2018), a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The trip to the beach, symbolically, stands as the turning point that unchains the debacle. We are left with the white little socks of an elder who contemplates, nostalgic for something she hasn't lost yet, how her family, falling apart, is still able to laugh while they get soaked by the swing of the waves. That marine laughter redeems them with the gift of transitory oblivion. It must not be forgotten that, for people like this, fluctuating between tenderness and moral impairment, not remembering is, precisely, to live. The covered feet of the old woman sink into the sand while the salty air announces the darkest hour. Hatsue Shibata always knew everything and recognized, on the beautiful postcard facing the Pacific, that her role in this life was to operate as a containment dike whose cracks, in her view, would not resist much longer. With her final departure the luck would be cast. A real family would never treat you like that.
With the most heartbreaking epilogue I have seen in a long time, the film rises to unsuspected heights. Its greatest virtue lies in the universality that underlies the act of unmasking others to find, behind their faces, a mirror. Kore-eda decides to go a little further giving us the story of a family whose members, to a greater or lesser degree, resemble all families. Through the work of the DoP, Ryûto Kondô, with a visual design inclined to the open and extreme long shots, we are given, through a delicate and tender lens, a small doorway into the intimacy of a family. By means of an exceptional exercise of the cinematographic technique, Kondô presents an eclectic richness in the use of full framings, medium shots and close-ups, with uninterrupted variations of low and high angles, as well as parallel tracking shots that involve us in the displacements of the characters. His camera captures the flowering of certain family relationships from the roofs, the lampposts, the fences of a parking lot (use of a crane), amplifying the immensity of those primary links that, at a distance, seem to strengthen as the film progresses. But also, making use of an outstanding inventiveness, he gives us beautiful perspectives from a dilapidated closet (or behind a door or window). With that in mind, we are dealing with interior poetics: from the interior of a house we move to the interior of a room, and, from this, to the interior of the furniture of that room. It is a metaphor of the film's plot pretensions, where photography shows us, sensually, an emotional path to access a labyrinth of interiorities. The happiness of a girl, victim of kidnapping, who smiles along with her new family while contemplating at a distance, between a small slit, the fireworks.
Andô Sakura and Lily Franky in Shoplifters (2018), a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
I've read about out-of-touch-moralists who have dared to point out, with an accusing finger, the supposed flexibility in which citizen, work and family ethics are portrayed in the film. It seems that they haven't found out that in the real world, people of flesh and bone suffer from hunger and cold, to say the least. Advocacy of crime? Not at all, only that, if the author wishes, art could imitate life, and in this case, the work of Kore-eda stands out with mastery. Family nuclei, such as that embodied in the history of the Shibatas, swarm everywhere (if they are not the majority), and of a much less attentive and affectionate tendency. I will be told that the film, thus, becomes contradictory in its principles, since it is Shota himself who, suddenly, in the middle of an episode in which he seems to be assaulted by the kantian categorical imperative, decides to turn his back on the criminal activities of his family. It will be said that every human consciousness gets paralyzed by the perfidy of a father like Osamu, or the call of attention of a merchant who discovers that the kid was involving a girl, Yuri, even younger than him, in the shameful dynamic. Seems that attention has been dispersed in the most transcendental moments and it has not been understood how impregnable usually turns out to be that which precedes us. It is foolish to look for guilty in a universe in which, by overwhelming proportions, victims often act also as victimizers. There is a fierce battle between the name of the father and the homologation of the names of father and son, between the novel notion on private property of a child and the (unjustified) handling of guilt due the death of Yamatoya and his business’ shutdown. Life itself has never allowed to be reduced to mere principles. What is in a store does not belong to anyone yet.
We have a child who despairs, overwhelmed by the anguish and the lack of answers, taking the decision to jump off a bridge while he was rushing trying to escape without getting caught after the usual supermarket theft. We see oranges rolling down the street thinking, perhaps, that such an outcome would be the exemplary consequence that such parents deserve. But to end this way would be to naively accept that the moralists were right by reducing the world to a blind binary conception of human actions. Let's rewind. Shota gets angry, in a fit of jealousy, because he feels his father privileges his new sister over him. He locks himself in an abandoned car, until his father, knowing where to find him, locates his whereabouts. Again: Shota despairs and jumps, we think that he has ended up with his own life, but no, he only has broken a leg. As happened to Osamu while he worked honestly. Is it perceived with clarity that the circle always ends up closed? In the epilogue, before our eyes follows a series of close-ups that show us the distorted faces of our usual defendants, Nobuyo and Osamu Shibata, worst parents of the universe. We see a mother touching her own forehead and head frantically, as if wanting to tear away with her nails the ideas that cause all the pain. Her grief is concentrated in the final dissolution of an ethereal fantasy. She lost her job and now she will lose her freedom for trying to keep together those who shared more than blood. We remember her tears as she held her own Lin (Yuri) between her arms, while burning the last garments given by the family that despised and assaulted the little girl. We replicate her question: Is it only mother who begets? Does it make you a mother automatically?
Andô Sakura, Sasaki Miyu, Matsuoka Mayu, Lily Franky, and Jyo Kairi in Shoplifters (2018), a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Osamu's chilling sentence still echoes in our ears when trying to respond to the accusation in relation to his criminal behavior and the deviant consequences that this brought to his children's lives: I had nothing else to teach them. This is the only moderately satisfactory answer any parent can offer if manage, for a moment, to remove the moral bandage from its own eyes. I have nothing more to teach them... To us, the spectators, by force of dramatic tension, this blindfold have been violently snatched and we have seen a light that dazzles, approaching vertiginously. Yuri is just the iteration of Shota. Nobuyo and Osamu, had murdered the ex-husband of her, thus beginning their criminal life. The woman, who assumes —after previous agreement with her very coward partner— the total responsibility for the crime, is sterile. Aki, whose alter ego as a showgirl was Sayaka, has named herself (without knowing) after her true sister, Sayaka, and comes from a perfect family whose father is the son of the second marriage (of the woman who stole grandpa) that the late husband of our Hatsue had. Her family still lies (or not?) with the fact that their eldest daughter, Aki, is studying in Australia. They, with an ineffable guilt, always gave money to the grandmother (who spent it unfruitfully in the slots of a despicable casino), perhaps for the maintenance of the lost daughter, maybe not. And it does not matter. She believed that her grandmother had accepted her out of love. The fracture in the life of these characters is irreversible, and so ubiquitous, that it seems to touch with salt an open wound in the most intimate region of any family nuclei. We are not good enough for him.
Shota, finds out from his mother, that he was kidnapped as Yuri, but, in his case, from the back seat of a vehicle. Now he understands the reasons for his favorite hideout. His life, like the snowman he sculps with Osamu on the last night they share, is deformed and condensed into an unfathomable pain that, at his young age, tears apart the already fragile identity he thought was his. Nevertheless, he is still capable of stabbing the soul when —with vivid eyes— demands the official who assists him, a fact that, although modern social conventions make us believe is correct, becomes alarming: I thought that those who are going to school couldn't study at home. After hearing about the immediate future that awaits him, even with all the support he receives from state institutions, Shota's speech tears apart what is usually conceived as love and family responsibility. The kid's expression forces to recognize that, even though his family is a disaster, they shared everything with him. Shota, at such a young age, knows himself eternally a Shibata, and in a mutism forced by the noise of the collective automotive, after recognizing that he wanted to be caught, he turns his gaze towards Osamu, who runs without control after the bus that will separate him forever from his son, while drawing with his lips the most beautiful and lacerating word that could be said to that diminished man: お 父 さ ん (Otōsan = dad).
Jyo Kairi in Shoplifters (2018), a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Shoplifters shows us a different but more palpable Japan than ever. A demystified nation, stripped of marketing and the omnipresent katanas of the Tokugawa Period. As if Commodore Perry, and the American military, had never imposed their will over the Japanese, since 1854. The movie isn't, naturally, the first cinematographic work that has achieve this, but it is careful enough to show that the homogenous conception of the West about the asian country is absolutely laughable. There are as many Japan as there are Japanese, and the misfortunes and tribulations suffered in this hemisphere are endured over there under the coordinates of their cultural context. Our children, in Latin America, hide their milk teeth under the pillow, waiting for the Ratoncito Pérez to pick them up during the night, while they sleep, leaving as a sign of barter a monetary sum. In English-speaking countries, for its part, they have the Tooth Fairy. In Japan, when the dental piece become detached from the upper section, it is customary to get it buried; but when it is of the lower area, it is usually thrown into the air —particularly to the roof[i]—, with the intention that the new tooth grows healthy and strong [ii]. In a context in which the sweet character of Father Coloma has not been able to penetrate, we are reminded that, in childhood, there are mythical stories more transcendental than those told by our parents or relatives in sleepless nights. We are talking about the living narrations, of flesh and bone, embodied in the beings we love and admire as children. When not even your mother wanted to have you, you become someone like us.
Therefore, it is infertile to lecture on the intensity degrees of filial love, a fact that anguished Nobuyo deeply. Furthermore, it is a futility to aspire to quantify if the family that has been given to us, arbitrarily, is more loved than the one we choose, coming to it long after birth. For a child of Yuri’s or Shota’s age, anyone can be family if they receive from them an affective and respectful treatment... anyone. Even a thief. If insisted on ignoring such an elementary and foundational premise of the human psyche, there will only remain the recalcitrant grief of a lonely girl, already forgotten by her abusive father and her abused mother, who with a tender voice recites us the songs of numbers (to learn to count) taught by the monstrous family that kidnapped her for months (making her feel loved). There shall be left her sweet polychrome sketches of a visit to the beach. The candid melancholy of such a girl, seems to want to please the vertigo while holding the railing of a balcony that resembles where everything started. In her retina, the memory of feeling part of something still sparkles, despite the fact that she lived so far away then from her real family... In her memory, the immortal flight of his brother Shota still gleams...
[i] It is well known that this tradition is shared with characters such as the Maritxu teilatukoa of the Basque Country, or the one at the Kingdom of Bhutan where they present the teeth as an offering to the Goddess of the Moon; as well as similar customs in Egypt, Togo, and some regions of Brazil, Honduras and Belize, with its respective regional variants.
[ii] There's no wonder about the certain materialistic inclination derived from shinto, which privileges the veneration of the spirits of nature (Kami 神). The first practice, the burial one, thought to be derived from Sarutahiko Ōkami (猿田毘古大神, 猿田彦大神), terrestrial deity who receives Amaterasu (天照), solar goddess; and the second, when throwing the tooth to the air, relative to Fūjin (風神), deity of the wind.