A man, Osamu, and a boy, Shota, enter a grocery store. The man is shopping casually, the boy following a pace or two behind. They give a quick fist bump, and split up. The boy approaches a rack of goods. It becomes clear the man is positioning himself to be the boy’s looking. He flashes a couple meaningful hand gestures, and the kid slips goods into his backpack — ramen and other packaged food. They leave together, heading home to feed their family. Instead, however, they find a new family member.
The 2018 Japanese film Shoplifters, directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu, was the latest installment in Best Video’s CT Humanities-supported film series, “Contemporary Classics of International Cinema,” which pairs a screening of a modern international classic with an introduction and moderated discussion. Tuesday’s presenter was Aaron Gerow, A. Whitney Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages & Literatures and Film and Media Studies and current chair of Yale’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literature. The screening took place Tuesday night at the film and cultural center on Whitney Avenue in Hamden.
“Even though I’m an academic, I love screenings,” Gerow said. “To be able to show films I love to people from all walks of life is a great thrill for me.” Describing Kore-eda as “probably one of the most prominent Japanese filmmakers,” Gerow explained how the director had gotten his start making documentaries before he switched to feature films, and that early experience continues to inform his style. He leans hard into realism, and will change the plan of his movie to accommodate things that happen while he’s filming. When he works with the children who act in his movies, he treats them “not as actors, but as children.” He doesn’t give them scripts and allows them to improvise dialogue.
Working with children is particularly important to Shoplifters because the movie essentially is “a questioning of family,” Gerow said. “What is it? Is it blood or something else? He interrogates that in film after film.”
Gerow also noted that Shoplifters turned out to be controversial upon its release because it was deemed critical of Japan itself. This got at the larger question of “whether this film is really political,” Gerow said. Kore-eda “would say no,” he added. But Kore-eda also asked viewers to ponder questions about invisibility. “Who is visible and who is invisible? Who can see and who cannot see?”
Gerow’s introduction served the viewing well, as Shoplifters got under way. It tells the story of a family living in an old, ramshackle house in the middle of Tokyo, making ends meet through a series of dead-end menial jobs and small crimes, including, of course, the one in the title. The action of the movie is set in motion after the initial scene of shoplifting involving Osamu and Shota. On their way home they see a little girl, Yuri, on a balcony who seems hungry. So they take her home with them. They feed her a hot meal with the entire family — mother Nobuyo, a woman named Aki, and a grandmotherly figure named Hetsue. They end up putting her up for the night. The next day they resolve to take her back to her family, but as they approach the apartment, they hear the sounds of domestic violence within, along with an admission from one of the parents that they wish they never had a child. So they keep Yuri, raising her with a great deal of affection and a lot of petty theft. This isn’t the sort of movie that one wants to give too much away about, but somewhere around the 90-minute mark, the film takes a sharp turn from a deeply tender family drama into something much richer and more complex, culminating in one of the most affecting, emotional endings this viewer has seen since crying twice while watching Roma.
Shoplifters ended with the audience in stunned silence, except for a sniffle or two. Gerow returned to the front of the room.
“So what did you think?” he said. “What did you think of this family?” Would anyone still want to be a part of it, after everything we learned in the last 90 minutes? In a testament to the kind of movie Shoplifters is, most said yes.
Gerow’s background about Japanese culture illuminated the themes in the movie. He related that every year, children die of heat stroke in cars because the parents are inside playing pachinko, an addictive gambling game. “Everyone in Japan knows about these incidents,” he said. He also explained how the Japanese media loves to hype missing children cases, treating families as either hardened criminals or model citizens — which makes Kore-eda’s complex portrayal something of an indictment, both of the way we judge families and the way we consume media.
“What are we using in order to read what’s going on? We have all these images from the media, and that’s how we read images,” Gerow said. “The film is asking us to rethink how we read family, how we read identity, and to come at the family from a very different perspective.”
Gerow also had something to say about the structure of the film, and the way it tied into the themes. “One of the big issues is that the film is very intentionally only giving you a little bit of information,” he said. “This is a film that demands that the audience work to try to understand what might be going on, but also to think about the relationships.”
Those relationships only deepen as the film continues, and the traumas many of the characters have faced come to light. Which returned Gerow to the idea of Shoplifters as a political film — just not a polemical one. The family’s invisibility to those around them is both a problem and a solace. “It’s a film that insists on a more complex vision of the world,” he said. “You, the audience, have to think about the politics. The film is saying it’s up to you. What do you think? And that’s a different kind of politics.”
Visit Best Video’s website for information on further screenings and other events.
