‘Shoplifters‘ by Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda confuses its audiences for much of the length of the film. For about three quarters of the duration of the screening, it looks like we are dealing with a family drama that takes place in medium of the poor classes of a contemporary Japanese metropolis. We see a needy family living in a kind of barrack, with the father and mother of the family performing poorly paid manual labor, which they actually lose one after the other, while serenely complementing the income with shoplifting in stores. They live together with a mother (or maybe grandmother) in her elderly age, and the woman’s sister who works in a striptease parlor. Their boy does not go to school and is told that ‘only those who can not learn at home go to school.’ His ‘education’ includes dexterity in shoplifting. When a girl subjected violence in her family is adopted we seem to enter the realm of social melodrama. Something happens late in the story, I will not reveal what, and everything changes – the style of the film, and the image we acquired about this family that is far away from the image of a ‘traditional family’.
Leo Tolstoy warned is that happy families all look alike. The truth is, however, that the family in ‘Shoplifters’ seems to be too happy despite what they have to go through in order to survive. The details of the lives of those on the outskirts of society are rendered carefully and accurately. Social conventions that play such an important role in Japanese life and in Japanese films do not seem to work here. Although there are some premonitory signs here and there, the change in perspective comes as a surprise to us, spectators. The story is written and told in such a way that questions all the stereotypes that we may have about good and evil, about morality and legality, about death, but especially about family and children education.
The tone of the film is generous and optimistic, and this is a sublimation of a message that we may find shocking after watching it all. I liked the cinematography, the actors’ performances, the vision of a Japan different than the one we know as tourists or by watching the majority of the Japanese films. The risk, however, that director Hirokazu Koreeda has assumed is that the “conventional” part of the film takes too long. I confess that at some point I lost interest. The shock of the revelations in the last part of ‘Shoplifters‘ woke me up, but the thread was already broken and it was not easy to find it again. However, the effort was rewarded. It’s a movie that I recommend, a non- conventional Japanese film.