Shoplifters (2018)

Blood is thicker than water. You can choose your friends but can't choose your family. Whatever happens, your mother is always your mother. These are some common phrases that many people tend to use as 100% true statements. I don't think they're true. At all. And, considering the content of Shoplifters, I don't think writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda does either.

Shoplifter revolves around a family unit that has, at its core, a father (Osamu, played by Lily Franky), a mother (Nobuyo, played by Sakura Ando), and one son (Shota, played by Kairi Jō). There's also a grandmother and one other, younger, woman in the house. They have their moments, but they're not the beating heart of the tale. Osamu and Shota are the shoplifters, perfecting their craft daily and making a decent score from each trip to the shops. When they find a very young girl named Yuri (Miyu Sasaki) they eventually decide to let her stay with them. It seems that Yuri has been stuck in an unhappy situation for most of her brief childhood, so her new life is an improvement, even if she ends up being introduced to the shoplifting life.

That's one main aspect of Shoplifters, the fact that a family made up of bad people can still be a good thing for the ones they love and care for. The main adults that we are watching have some major flaws, but those flaws don't seem to matter so much when they're also shown to be offering something that was missing from the lives of the young ones in their lives. The other main aspect of the movie is that family doesn't have to be made up of the people assigned to you at birth. You CAN pick who becomes your family. There are two quotes that stand out here, although I will have to paraphrase. One is about how the bonds you choose are stronger than the bonds simply forced upon you. The other is when a character states that giving birth to a child doesn't automatically make you a mother. It's often the case that we hear about men not being fathers just because they helped to conceive the child, but the same is equally true of mothers (although they go through much more on the journey from conception to birth, of course).

The acting from all involved here is superb, so I will just single out both Kairi Jō and Miyu Sasaki, who give two of the best child performances I have seen in recent years. The former is at an age where he is starting to ask a few more questions and consider acts of rebellion, the latter is young and innocent without being overly delicate or precocious. As an ensemble piece, this is pretty much flawless when it comes to the acting.

It helps that Koreeda has crafted such a wonderful tale, one that unfolds with a few twists and turns that allow you to question your own views without ever feeling as if the rug was pulled out from under your feet. The film is full of a precariously balanced state of peace and contentment that you suspect may not last, and indeed feel cannot last for these characters, yet you want it to. You want it to last forever.

There's a scene in the final act of Shoplifters that has the main characters all enjoying a day at the beach. It's a sweet, uplifting scene. If Koreeda has worked his magic on you, as he did on me, then you want the film to just end there. That's a family having a pretty perfect family day out. But that's not where the story ends. What family story does?

9/10

Shoplifters can be picked up here, eventually.