Shoplifters (2018)
Father and son team Osamu and Shota Shibata, respectively, are experienced shoplifters, working together with hand signals to procure some items from the supermarket in the opening scene. Clearly, they’ve done this before, they work well together, and afterwards, the two look happy just to be together. They stop at a street vendor’s stall to buy some warm croquettes, and then on their way home, they see a frail, young girl, who they’ve seen before, sitting alone in the cold. We soon learn that her name is Yuri (played by Miyu Sasaki) and she is around four years old. Osamu offers her one of their croquettes and lets her come home with them to have dinner with their family.
The family consists of the couple Osamu (Lily Franky) and Nobuyo (Sakura Andô) and their “son” Shota (Jyo Kairi) who is not their own but a boy they picked up somewhere, though it’s not clear whether it was for Shota’s benefit or not, their “sister” Aki (Mayu Matsuoka), and “Grandma” Hatsue Shibata (Kirin Kiki). They are a loyal band of misfits who live in poverty in a very small and cramped space, but at least it’s a warm and friendly space, which is much more than young Yuri’s home offers, as they soon find out. At dinner they discover that Yuri has scars all over her, and when Nobuyo and Osamu try to take her back home, as they approach her house they hear Yuri’s parents arguing, and possibly having a physical altercation from the sound of it, over how neither of them want Yuri, and it seems they haven’t even noticed that Yuri’s gone. Nobuyo and Osamu can’t bring themselves to leave her outside to freeze in the cold, and they can’t take her to her fighting parents, either, so they bring Yuri back to their home.
Another family would have probably called the authorities, but considering their own living conditions and the fact that they shoplift to support their working income, they can’t bring that kind of attention to themselves. So they quietly take Yuri in to stay with them. As Yuri’s story unfolds, we learn that she has been burned with an iron and gets hit after getting new clothes from her mom. In one of the most emotionally moving scenes, Nobuyo burns her old outfit and tells her that “if they loved you, if they really loved you, this is what you do,” and hugs Yuri. At this point it seems like Yuri has a real chance at a good life, and the family could be happy together just as they are.
Written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, Shoplifters makes you question systems of society – legal systems, familial systems, and economic systems, especially one that would effectuate a working family to shoplift just to scrape by in life. One scene even refers to a book, “Swimmy,” whose story sounds symbolic of an economic system where a wide wealth gap prevails. It is a children’s book about a very large tuna fish that eats all of the small fish in a group, all but Swimmy, who is different from the other fish and fast enough to get away. Later, Swimmy convinces a new group of fish to swim together as a big fish, with Swimmy as the eye, to scare away the large tuna. Like Swimmy’s new family, the Shibatas stick together in their own unconventional way to survive and experience some of the simple joys that life has to offer.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, I wouldn’t watch the trailer because it gives too much away, but this scene paints a picture of the Shibatas and Yuri as they enjoy a day at the beach.
