Shoplifters
Manbiki kazoku

After a brief detour into the crime thriller genre with the previous year's The Third Murder, prolific Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (Nobody Knows, I Wish, After the Storm) returns to form with his best picture since the 2013 Cannes Jury Prize winner Like Father Like Son. Always a master at finding complexity in stories that seem simple on their surface, Kore-eda explores families and small communities in circumstances that are sometimes ordinary, sometimes exceptional. The characters in Shoplifters qualify as both and neither.

Frequent Kore-eda lead Lily Franky stars as Osamu, the “patriarch” of a family living on the margins of society in Tokyo. He and his wife Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) live in the cramped home of an elderly woman they call Grandmother (veteran Japanese actress Kirin Kiki in her final performance). They share this leaky tin hovel with a young woman, Aki (Mayu Matsuoka), and a boy, Shota (Kairi Jō), whom Osamu schools in the ways of boosting food and other “not yet owned” goods from stores. One day, on their way back from the daily business of stealing food, Osamu and Shota come across a little girl from their neighborhood, Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), whom they soon discover is the victim of abuse. Yuri is quickly assimilated into the family without much discussion of the moral or legal ramifications—by these folks’ thinking, it’s not kidnapping if you don’t ask for a ransom—and she soon accompanies Shota on his daily missions of petty theft.

Manbiki Kazoku (the Japanese title, which translates to Shoplifting Family) gets directly to the heart of Koreeda's most recurrent theme: “What constitutes family?” Utilizing his observant, naturalistic approach, the writer/director/producer/editor crafts a deeply compassionate but never sentimental film. The protagonists are not what we would traditionally consider a “chosen family,” or even an intentional one. The ethics and healthiness of their bond is the central question raised by the movie. Like all this filmmaker’s work, even The Third Murder, the story gets told through the internal shifts of its characters’ emotions rather than the machinations of its scant narrative beats. The extraordinary multi-generational cast not only commands our attention, but also draws us in as Kore-eda slowly peels back layer upon layer until we (almost) fully understand their history, relationships, and other connections.

While frequently compared to the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu, Kore-eda often claims British neo-realistic director Ken Loach as his biggest influence. Shoplifters feels very much like a Loach picture in its subject and its ability to critique the greater ills of society through the lens of a small group of his country's underclass, but Kore-eda's light, lyrical, non-pedagogic style has a signature all his own.