Recommending Shoplifters

Today I’m recommending the movie Shoplifters by Kore-eda. The first bit is spoiler-free.

A friend of mine described Shoplifters as being very human (“väldigt mänsklig” på svenska), which I think is apt. It is a story that feels more relaxed in a way that makes me feel like the characters are regular human beings, rather characters in a story. They are there on the screen, and we follow them around, but they don’t tell us everything they think or why they do the things they do — just like real people. Not everything is resolved, and some things are left a complicated tangle — just like real life.

When it comes to the camerawork, it isn’t the most eye catching thing in the world, but I think it does some interesting things in its acquiescence. Most of the time it stays out of the way, but one scene in particular has perhaps my favourite piece of camera work in cinema. You will probably know which one after you’ve watched it.

Anyways, that’s all I have to say without going into more details. Now go watch the movie!

More spoiler-filled thoughts 🔗︎

To me it feels like the movie disemphasises plot, focusing on unravelling a picture instead of a series of events. It felt weird when a (different) friend analysed the film in terms of plot. He focused on what happened when Lin joins the family and how that changes things. That focus on how things changes feels strange to me. It’s not really that it misses the point, but it feels like the premise of the question doesn’t apply.

The movie almost feels like it isn’t moving. It’s a still picture, a portrait of the family, once from the inside and once from the outside as the outside tears the family apart, dissecting it looking for evidence for their sins.

It’s a bit like Totoro in that the plot that exists is limited in the space of the movie. “The plot” of Totoro takes place at the end of the movie when the little sister disappears and the entire village tries to find her. Before that there isn’t really a conflict, and it’s more of a portrait of a family that has moved to the country-side. In a similar way the plot of Shoplifters is limited to what the son Shota goes through with his thoughts around shoplifting and the advent of a new sister. But that is not a big part of the movie, or at least not all that it is about. There is so much more going on with the other family members that is fairly unchanging.

I think this movie does “Show don’t tell” in a similar way to how Steven Erikson describes it. It doesn’t let the characters tell their situation, but instead shows it through implications. The dad and the mum’s relation is the best example, where their relationship is shown to be analogous to the elder daughter Sayaka’s relation to mr. 4 (四番さん). At one point she tells the mother about her customer mr. 4 that she has taken a liking to. The mother responds by implying that she met the dad in a similar way, which tells us a lot about the parents without really needing to show us anything. It’s interesting because sometimes it can be a bit hard to know where you got a piece of information from, because the movie doesn’t explicitly tell it. I think I really like that.

Another quiet example is that the biological mum and dad are probably lying to the press when they say that Lin’s favourite dish is omelettes. Really, the gluten thingies that she receives from the shoplifter family are her favourite. The biological parents have shown that they don’t really care about her, and they don’t even know what food she likes. This probably plays into the social commentary that happens in the final bit of the film, a part of the critique against the spectacle of crime in Japan. Japanese media (at least Abema News from what I have seen) seem to be very fond of crime and report aggressively on it and want to get every juicy detail about of it. It feels almost gleeful to me. “Look how horrible these people are and how weak they look now that we have caught them”. The police and the media have a predetermined view of what families like this look like, and are very eager to find every sin they can, and try to convince the kids of how bad the adults are and how exploited they were. It’s a show.

It is also a critique of exaggerated emphasis on biological family. Shoplifters depicts a happy family. They’re happy because they chose each other, and they’re happy with each other despite the social situation they are in. That is the picture the film paints over the majority of its runtime. Then at the end, when the plot happens, we’re shown what happens when society comes in and forces the notion of biological family on them. When they’re questioning the kids they’re assuming they were taken away by force, that they couldn’t possibly have been happy away from their biological parents. They try to make the kids admit it, even though they don’t know if that assumption is correct. Instead of asking open-ended questions, the police are trying to put words in the kids’ mouths, to appease their own narrow sense of justice.

This leads me to my favourite scene of the movie, which is part of this unravelling and is the scene I mentioned in the introduction. It is the interrogation of the mother where the camera is level with her head and pointed directly at her face. It’s amazing how much is accomplished with this seemingly basic, extremely static camera angle. The mug shot angle and the disembodied voices of the cops really bring an intense sense of discomfort, and convey how exposed she is, how the rest of society presumes her guilty, imposing their ideas of family and motherhood onto her. The interrogators aren’t shown at all, which I think helps them stand in for what they represent rather than who they are as individuals. The interrogations in general and this scene in particular are what the movie is built around and I think motivates the rest of the creative decisions. And the acting! I rarely react to actors performances, but this one is so good and the framing centres it. She can’t escape, but we are also stuck there, with her.

Related: Refusing to cut