What does it mean to be a family? Shoplifters investigates this question through two hours of cinematic exploration and brilliant subtlety – scroll through to read more about the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner: Spoilers ahead
Shoplifters (2018) is about a struggling family of five, cramped into a small apartment in a lonesome corner of Tokyo. To survive, they employ minimum-wage jobs and round-out their earnings through shoplifting. Not without a heart of gold, the merry band of misfits rescue Yuri, a five-year-old girl abandoned in an apartment balcony. Yuri becomes the pivotal change that sets things into motion – as she adapts to her new family, secrets are slowly revealed – though, not all is understood up until the last frame.
Living together in one small room, six people strive to find happiness in poverty, longing, and despair. One begins to wonder: how long can they keep this up? Throughout the film, Kore-eda explores the politics of family ties and the meaning behind the words: mother, father, brother, and sister. The movie unfolds in a relatively slow pace and constantly focuses on the young boy, Shota. Shota has some difficulty welcoming Yuri into the family while he struggles to understand what it means to have a father, especially one who steals to provide.
The narrative in itself is enthralling and the screenplay, incredibly well-written. The cinematography is as playful as the story it carries, a consistent contrast between cramped spaces and panning landscapes. There seems to be an attention on the mundane conversations that occur between family members – as if pulling to the fore the mind-numbing realization that although there is much said between family, there is also an entire universe of the omitted.
The life of the Shibata family is consistently in decay. The first two acts of the film focus on revealing the personal lives of each member and their struggle to find happiness. A pivotal scene in the film is the family’s trip to the beach – Yuri’s first time ever. Here they laugh and find joy in each other’s company. For a few minutes on-screen, the Shibata family begins to feel lovable and approachable – no longer bitter and rough with constant exhaustion.
