World film project: Japan
Sep. 22nd, 2020 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livThank you to everybody who made recommendations of live-action Japanese films. I almost want to pause on Japan and watch several of them! We ended up picking Shoplifters (2018, dir Hirokazu Koreeda). It is a really lovely piece, though sad, and I'm extremely glad I watched it.
Shoplifters is about a motley household of squatters who try to make a chosen family against the odds. It's incredibly sweet, but also strictly avoids any romanticism. To the extent that the family experiment fails because of everything that's against it; they don't miraculously overcome the odds, they gamble and lose.
The acting is absolutely amazing, I really believed in and cared about all the characters and the relationships between them. The tone remains mostly sweet rather than grim, but it's also pretty clear-eyed about the realities of getting by on a mixture of petty crime, sex work, insecure menial jobs and blackmail. Most of the film just involves cameos of people's lives, focusing mainly on the love and camaraderie rather than the hardships.
The main plot involves the squat kidnapping a little girl from her abusive parents. They tell themselves it's not kidnapping because they're not demanding a ransom, but they all agree it can't really last and they know they're going to get caught sooner or later. The abuse is not glossed over at all, but it also isn't sensationalized; you overhear the parents yelling at the child, and she shows her scars to the new family, but the violence isn't actually on screen. As the film unfolds, alongside the touching scenes of her learning to trust the four new adults in her life and building a relationship with her new foster-brother, you learn gradually learn that the household have committed much more serious crimes than just the shoplifting.
The adults reassuring the young teen boy that they still love him and he's not being displaced by his new sister is really sweet, but also it turns out that he also joined the family via kidnapping. The grandmother with her folk medicine and sharp observations is lovely, but also she's supporting them financially via some complicated blackmail scheme involving the adult offspring of her ex-husband's affair. The relationship between the central couple is absolutely beautiful, not at all hearts and flowers romance but a really deep bond. And again, you learn that a big part of the connection between them is that they previously conspired to murder the woman's abusive ex. All the past misdeeds are at least justifiable, they're not just callous criminals, but they have really dark pasts.
In the end what brings them to the attention of the police is a relatively small infraction, illegally burying the grandmother in order to hide her death (of natural causes) and avoid funeral expenses. Plus the teen boy panics and deliberately gets caught shoplifting oranges. There's some harrowing scenes where the kind, professional social workers more or less trap the various members of the family into turning each other in, and return the little girl to her abusive parents, and send the woman of the couple to jail (her partner took the rap for the pre-story murder, so they arrange that she alone should be found responsible for the kidnapping, as she doesn't have a criminal record) and the teenager to a group foster home. The thing I didn't like about the ending was the parents-by-kidnapping choosing to deliberately alienate the boy so that he would stop trying to have a relationship with them and make the most of his new life.
But I don't know what I would have wanted to happen, really; in a Hollywood film they would probably have ended with the happy family playing on the beach and let you believe in the miracle of these outcasts making their chosen family and finding redemption, and I'm on the whole pleased to see something more realistic than that. The film is completely clear-eyed about the fact that it's not actually healthy for children to be brought up in a criminal gang with no education except training in shoplifting, even if the criminals genuinely love them. And maybe the happy ending is supposed to be that the little girl at least had a year when she was loved and not beaten, the family at least had their relatively happy time together even if it couldn't last.
Next: Ethiopia. Anyone have a favourite Ethiopian film? The 12th to 22nd biggest countries are really quite an interesting mix, so I'm looking forward to the next stage of our quest!
Shoplifters is about a motley household of squatters who try to make a chosen family against the odds. It's incredibly sweet, but also strictly avoids any romanticism. To the extent that the family experiment fails because of everything that's against it; they don't miraculously overcome the odds, they gamble and lose.
The acting is absolutely amazing, I really believed in and cared about all the characters and the relationships between them. The tone remains mostly sweet rather than grim, but it's also pretty clear-eyed about the realities of getting by on a mixture of petty crime, sex work, insecure menial jobs and blackmail. Most of the film just involves cameos of people's lives, focusing mainly on the love and camaraderie rather than the hardships.
The main plot involves the squat kidnapping a little girl from her abusive parents. They tell themselves it's not kidnapping because they're not demanding a ransom, but they all agree it can't really last and they know they're going to get caught sooner or later. The abuse is not glossed over at all, but it also isn't sensationalized; you overhear the parents yelling at the child, and she shows her scars to the new family, but the violence isn't actually on screen. As the film unfolds, alongside the touching scenes of her learning to trust the four new adults in her life and building a relationship with her new foster-brother, you learn gradually learn that the household have committed much more serious crimes than just the shoplifting.
The adults reassuring the young teen boy that they still love him and he's not being displaced by his new sister is really sweet, but also it turns out that he also joined the family via kidnapping. The grandmother with her folk medicine and sharp observations is lovely, but also she's supporting them financially via some complicated blackmail scheme involving the adult offspring of her ex-husband's affair. The relationship between the central couple is absolutely beautiful, not at all hearts and flowers romance but a really deep bond. And again, you learn that a big part of the connection between them is that they previously conspired to murder the woman's abusive ex. All the past misdeeds are at least justifiable, they're not just callous criminals, but they have really dark pasts.
In the end what brings them to the attention of the police is a relatively small infraction, illegally burying the grandmother in order to hide her death (of natural causes) and avoid funeral expenses. Plus the teen boy panics and deliberately gets caught shoplifting oranges. There's some harrowing scenes where the kind, professional social workers more or less trap the various members of the family into turning each other in, and return the little girl to her abusive parents, and send the woman of the couple to jail (her partner took the rap for the pre-story murder, so they arrange that she alone should be found responsible for the kidnapping, as she doesn't have a criminal record) and the teenager to a group foster home. The thing I didn't like about the ending was the parents-by-kidnapping choosing to deliberately alienate the boy so that he would stop trying to have a relationship with them and make the most of his new life.
But I don't know what I would have wanted to happen, really; in a Hollywood film they would probably have ended with the happy family playing on the beach and let you believe in the miracle of these outcasts making their chosen family and finding redemption, and I'm on the whole pleased to see something more realistic than that. The film is completely clear-eyed about the fact that it's not actually healthy for children to be brought up in a criminal gang with no education except training in shoplifting, even if the criminals genuinely love them. And maybe the happy ending is supposed to be that the little girl at least had a year when she was loved and not beaten, the family at least had their relatively happy time together even if it couldn't last.
Next: Ethiopia. Anyone have a favourite Ethiopian film? The 12th to 22nd biggest countries are really quite an interesting mix, so I'm looking forward to the next stage of our quest!
