How do we define our family? Is it merely our clan, the group we are born into to whom we’re related by blood? Or is it rather a unit we find for ourselves; a collection of kind or like-minded people with whom we identify and understand? To some, perhaps many, it’s both. It’s becoming increasingly more common to recognize that a family, irrespective of relation, are simply the people who love and support us –that a close friend or partner may be more familial than a biological parent or sibling ever could be. The term ‘family’ and its associated vocabulary often comes with moral connotations as well: a (generally) upstanding man instructing someone younger on the road to reaching a form of maturity is customarily considered a father figure, media that is usually perceptively simplistic and non-threatening is deemed “family-friendly”, etc. This implies a universally shared idea of family and its virtuous expectations. However, when you get right down to it, a family, even in an artificial sense, is a more complicated thing, made especially so by the circumstances it exists in.
I think Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters is the most soulful examination of the concept and complexities of family in recent years. And it does so miraculously in a way that’s not overly subversive or deconstructive. I don’t know the last movie I’ve seen that has challenged a social definition so thoroughly and with such precision while reinforcing the deepest and most meaningful facets of that definition at the same time. You can be disconnected from other people, and still love them. You can be selfish, and still make selfless sacrifices. You can lie and steal and do objectively terrible things, and still be fundamentally a good person. Nobody in Shoplifters, apart from perhaps Yuri, is innocent; to some degree they all live outside the law. They’re kindred spirits though who found each other in the darkness of poverty, and in striving for that semblance of a better, normal life have become a family unit -not one they were born into, but one they chose for themselves.
Shoplifters is the story of Osamu (Lily Franky), Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), Shota (Kairi Jō), Aki (Mayu Matsuoka), Hatsue (Kirin Kiki), and Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), six people down on their luck living together in a run-down home in a poor district of Tokyo. Hatsue pays for the home through her late husbands’ pension, which also supports the group. Osamu, a handicapped labourer and Shota, an orphan boy he rescued from a locked car, often spend their days shoplifting. Nobuyo works for meagre pay at a launderers and Aki is a hostess club girl. Yuri, Nobuyo and Osamu technically kidnapped from an abusive household. The film quietly observes their lives, their relationships, and the consequences from living the way they do with the unassuming naturalism of an Ozu film and the subjective, deep social empathy of a Dickens novel.
Osamu, as a matter of fact, has been likened by some critics to Fagin, and it makes sense. He is a deceptive old man who takes a child under his wing whom he teaches to be a thief. But where Fagin was malicious and cruel beneath his façade of gaiety and kindness, Osamu is sincere, at least about his character. He may be irresponsible, reckless even, ignorant to how his influence could damage Shota, and he lies to him. He lies about who he is, as he does to everyone else as a means of escaping his and Nobuyo’s past, and he lies about the severity of shoplifting –convincing Shota that until something is bought it doesn’t belong to anyone –to assuage the boys’ strong moral compass (something which doesn’t work all that well).
But he really loves Shota in his tragic way, determined throughout the film to earn the verbal blessing of “dad”. It’s the most important thing to him, the validation he has his heart set on. But he doesn’t earn it. Because he doesn’t embody the traditional image of a father to Shota –the upstanding, respectable masculine role model of the home. Osamu only identifies himself as a patriarchal figure of the group by virtue of being the only man, and it’s not enough. He’s bound to the role he’s made for himself without accepting any of the responsibility. I think the Dickens character he actually has much more in common with is Wilkins Micawber.
And yet he is accepted by his surrogate family, perhaps not quite in the capacity he wants, but accepted nonetheless. Because each of them know the value of acceptance, through not having received it in their individual lives. The family of Shoplifters is united by their need for belonging, their need for a family to replace the ones that have spurned, neglected, or mistreated them. And the one who seemingly knows this best is Nobuyo.
Nobuyo, who treats everyone with kindness and love, who is intelligent and responsible where her lover Osamu is not, and who crucially makes the call to keep Yuri with them rather than return her to a house of abuse, because she knows what it means for the girl. She too wants this family to be her own, perhaps naively thinks it can be, and allows herself to be their mother figure. Unlike Osamu though, her love of Yuri and Shota is matched by tender motherly impulses and a strength of character that makes for a wonderful influence. There’s no artifice to her bond with the children. She spoils Yuri as much as she can, while forging a deep connection off of their shared trauma, and makes clear she will never be the kind of parent Yuri’s mother was. And she communicates with Shota on his level, truly understanding him better than Osamu. This nurturing, supportive, generous behaviour is something she simply can’t help.
Because Nobuyo can’t have children of her own, as we find out in her heartbreaking interrogation scene; yet she loves these children and has a passion for motherhood that far exceeds their real parents. Giving birth has nothing to do with being a mother, she argues, and though her judge won’t accept that, the film indiscriminately proves her right. She deserves to be the parent to these children, Yuri especially, and because the film so deftly and powerfully makes this case, it pulls off what may seem unthinkable by making you side with a child abduction.
But of course that’s the very purpose of Shoplifters. Kore-eda wants to challenge societal preconceptions and throw them into disarray. He’s not advocating for kidnapping obviously (otherwise he might have had the family get away with it), but he is questioning the pervading belief that children are safer with their parents than with unrelated adults.The tragedy of Shoplifters is when Yuri is returned to her parents in the most devastating ending to a movie I’ve seen in some time. Yuri does not belong with them, she belongs with the misfit family that found her. The family that gave her a new identity (Lin) and taught her happiness when all she’d known was misery and loneliness.
All she wanted was to be loved, to have people who dote on her but never harm her, to have someone with a scar like hers to show she’s not alone in her suffering. It’s through Yuri too that the movie comments on the idea of innocence corrupted, as it’s the perception of that that is the catalyst for the dissolution of the family. Yuri has learned to shoplift, which disturbs Shota to the point of attempting a suicide run. Kore-eda leaves the morality of Yuri taking after those raising her in such ways up to the audience, but he provides all the context needed to make up your own mind. Certainly, he doesn’t believe it’s a black and white subject.
Hatsue’s actions are cast in a similar ambiguously ethical light. She regularly receives money dishonestly through her husbands’ son from a subsequent marriage and has him and his wife convinced that their daughter Aki is studying in Australia. She is as much as Nobuyo and Osamu, an architect of this family, not only keeping Aki’s whereabouts a secret from her parents but keeping their ignorance a secret from Aki. Where Osamu wants Shota to be his son and Nobuyo wants Yuri to be her daughter, Hatsue wants Aki to be the granddaughter she never had herself. But again, it’s much more complicated than simply Hatsue being criminally selfish.
Unlike everyone else, Hatsue and Aki don’t come from a place of abuse (that we know of), yet are nonetheless outcasts. Hatsue was abandoned by her late husband (“thrown away” to paraphrase Nobuyo), and Aki is estranged from her parents most likely due to her life choices. The girl they believe is travelling and receiving an education is not the person Aki is or has any real interest in being. There’s a reason she accepted Hatsue’s invitation to live with her. She too is deeply troubled, revealing to a patron a degree of self-abuse, and is seeking understanding and companionship, seemingly looking for love in her job. And because of that severe loneliness, she takes real comfort in her surrogate family. Hatsue recognizes the importance of this, for years has experienced it herself, and it may be why she opened her home up to similar people left behind by blood and society.
There’s no more poignant distillation of that hopeless desolation than an orphan child left to die in a car by uncaring parents. Shota is the soul of the movie, the conscience. Like us, he both loves the family and recognizes their glaring faults, is fearful of them. He has the most conviction, the most respect for the law outside of their home. His moral code about stealing is incredibly important to him, admonishing Osamu for pilfering from a car and throwing his whole relationship to them in jeopardy. Was Osamu merely trying to steal something when he found Shota? That ethical crisis and a hefty amount of guilt over perpetuating and normalizing a dangerous lifestyle for Yuri is what pushes him over. Subconsciously, Yuri is his sister and he can’t bear seeing her become like him and Osamu. And so he allows himself to get caught. Given all that came after, did Shota do the right thing?
Shota was the most resistant to acknowledge the groups’ relationship as a family, but he viewed them in that context more than any of the others. If he wasn’t so emotionally attached, he wouldn’t have felt so let down by Osamu, so protective of Yuri, and so betrayed by the story that they were going to abandon him. And at the sign of a harmful influence on the most innocent of them, he chose to break the family, to prevent it from becoming like those they had left.
Shota and Osamu have an important heart-to-heart in the final scenes of the movie –their relationship for what it was, has remained intact. Their feelings about what happened seem to be of slight regret, yet Shota is firmly on the path to a better life at the end of the movie, free of the kind of ethical dilemma he’d formerly grappled with. But he’s keenly aware of what was lost. He has the future he might have lacked, but not the love the family gave him. Neither Osamu nor Nobuyo blame him for their exposure and her arrest –it was inevitable their past would catch up with them. And Osamu, in confessing the family did intend to abandon Shota, relinquishes his desire for a fatherly label, and in so doing becomes a better father than he’d ever been previously. Only with the desperation and the artifice removed, with the truth laid bare, can Shota verbally accept how he’s felt all along, and call Osamu “Dad”.
A lesser filmmaker might have avoided any ambiguity, told a story about six damaged people who constructed their own perfect family, but Kore-eda wouldn’t have found that interesting. His story had to emphasize the mistakes, faults, and morally questionable decisions such damage facilitates, alongside the love, warmth, and joy. Never once do you fail to empathize with these characters, fail to understand where they’re coming from, and how they justify such things as kidnapping and murder. It’s Kore-eda’s ability to cultivate in his audience a deep affection for this group amid or even because of their shortcomings that makes the movie resonate so profoundly. His concern for Japan’s underclass is palpable; specifically, poverty as the root of all evil here, economic anxiety and repressed opportunity. One of Kore-eda’s principal themes is the very understandable truth that dire circumstances produce bad behaviour in good people.
And yet Shoplifters would rather dwell in the good, because it is one of the great humanist films of the twenty-first century. It is on the assumption of the humanity of its viewers that the film succeeds. The concept of choosing a family over being born into one is brought up a couple times in the story, and it is the preferable alternative for Osamu, Nobuyo, Hatsue, Aki, Shota, and Yuri. Imperfect though they may be, they’re all each other has of a strong human connection. And that connection is how we define a family. The connection that allowed Hatsue to die peaceful and happy; the connection that prompted Nobuyo to solely take the fall; and the connection that kept Yuri morosely longing from her mothers’ balcony for her true family.
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