Can a family built on crime and deception be more authentic than one by blood?
In short: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 masterpiece Shoplifters explores the fragile boundaries of kinship. By following a group of poverty-stricken individuals who survive through petty theft and shared secrets, the film challenges conventional definitions of family, asking whether love is defined by biology or by the deliberate choice to belong to one another.
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Shoplifters emerged from a decade of contemplation regarding the nature of family. Inspired by reports of poverty and shoplifting in Japan, Kore-eda crafted a narrative centered on a makeshift household in Tokyo. The members include Hatsue, who supports the group with a pension; Nobuyo and Osamu, who struggle with low-wage labor and injury; and two children, Shota and Yuri. They operate on the fringes of society, using hand signals to steal goods and forming bonds that are tested when the reality of their situation—and their past crimes—begins to unravel.
The film’s production, which began in mid-December 2017, utilized 35 mm film to capture a specific texture and grain. Kore-eda sought to move beyond individual character arcs to depict 'the family within the society,' a wide-angle perspective reminiscent of his 2004 work, Nobody Knows. His research included visiting an orphanage, where a young girl reading Leo Lionni’s Swimmy inspired a poignant scene. This commitment to humanistic detail resonated globally, leading the film to win the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the first such win for a Japanese film since 1997.
Commercially and critically, the film was a triumph. It grossed over $72 million worldwide, making it the most successful of the 2019 Academy Award nominees for Best International Film. Critics praised its 'crystalline insight' and 'unsparing emotional acuity,' with many comparing its exploration of class and social structures to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist or the later South Korean film Parasite. While the characters engage in morally ambiguous acts—including the concealment of a death to maintain pension payments—the film remains a deeply affecting study of the loneliness of not belonging and the messy, vital necessity of sticking together.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Shoplifters (film)
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