Shoplifters

Lily Franky is the kind of grown-up you would have loved to have known as a child. Imp­ish, infec­tious­ly ener­getic and with a killer gig­gle, he stars in Hirokazu Koreeda’s Palme d’Or win­ner as Osamu, a man who can turn any space into a play­ground and any sce­nario into a game.

Not only is this cease­less imag­i­na­tion a warm char­ac­ter­is­tic of this con­struc­tion work­er-cum-pet­ty crim­i­nal, it’s also a trick to sur­vive. Through secret signs and rou­tines, Osama and his sur­ro­gate son Shota (Jyo Kairi) lift every­day items from their neigh­bour­ing stores. It’s a well-oiled col­lab­o­ra­tion pulled off with Dan­ny Ocean-style slick­ness (minus the swag­ger, save for a mod­est fist bump). ​“Whatever’s in the store doesn’t belong to any­one yet,” is the Shi­ba­ta fam­i­ly mot­to, a fit­ting slo­gan as both fam­i­ly and mot­to don’t exact­ly sit with­in society.

Hud­dled in the con­fines of a makeshift home, Osamu and Shota live as part of a mis­matched fam­i­ly bound by pover­ty. There’s Osamu’s wife, Nobuyo (Saku­ra Ando), and Aki (Mayu Mat­suo­ka), a younger woman whose rela­tion­ship with­in the fam­i­ly remains unclear. The late Kirin Kiki plays matri­arch Hat­sue, shed­ding the gen­tle charm that made her so enchant­i­ng in Nao­mi Kawase’s Sweet Bean for some­thing a lit­tle more wicked, but no less watchable.

Each have their own way of con­tribut­ing: Nobuyo works in a laun­dry house, pock­et­ing any­thing that falls out of the clothes she cleans; Hat­sue takes mon­ey from the fam­i­ly of her for­mer hus­band; Aki per­forms in a strip booth, jok­ing with Hat­sue about the val­ue of a lit­tle sideboob.

Koree­da has found a stel­lar cast for his mot­ley crew, with unques­tion­ably strong per­for­mances through­out, but Ando is par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing as Nobuyo. A com­plex young woman old before her time, she wears a near-con­stant expres­sion of amuse­ment, always try­ing to do the best for peo­ple even if it means telling them things they don’t want to hear.

The fam­i­ly dynam­ic is laid bare with the res­cu­ing of Yuri (played by dis­arm­ing­ly adorable new­com­er Miyu Susa­ki), a tac­i­turn five-year-old who the boys find alone on a bit­ter­ly cold night. Through her mute­ness (there are hints of domes­tic abuse from her real par­ents) we observe the unusu­al bonds that tie the house­hold togeth­er. Koree­da skill­ful­ly illus­trates what mea­sured affec­tion looks like; a self-made fam­i­ly unit aware that there is no oblig­a­tion or sen­ti­ment between them, yet they stay togeth­er anyway.

In an illu­mi­nat­ing scene, Osamu and Nobuyo, alone in the house on an unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly qui­et after­noon, move from slurp­ing noo­dles in icy water to hav­ing sex in a way that lacks romance but isn’t with­out love. Koree­da, who also edit­ed the film, brings such a still­ness to Shoplifters that when the fam­i­ly ties fray and snap it’s met with qui­et dev­as­ta­tion instead of a big emo­tion­al crescen­do – a sad con­fir­ma­tion that this is a house­hold that knew its days were numbered.

Here­in lies the film’s great­est strength: at its heart is a group of peo­ple liv­ing with the hid­den knowl­edge that con­se­quences will even­tu­al­ly catch up with them, so they must make the most of the time they have together.