Shoplifters argues that love matters more than blood. The interrogation room disagrees. The film cannot decide who is right.
When the detective asks Nobuyo whether she loved the girl, Nobuyo does not answer directly. She says, after a long pause, that Yuri chose her too. That the girl reached for her hand. That she held on.
It is the most honest moment in a deeply honest film, and it is also the moment the film cannot hold. Because what Nobuyo is describing — a child who reached for any warmth available, a woman who needed to be reached for — is something slightly different from what the film has spent ninety minutes arguing. The film’s argument is that the Shibata family is bound by love rather than blood, that chosen family is more real than biological family, that what matters is who shows up. What Nobuyo’s answer in the interrogation room quietly concedes is something more complicated: that every member of this family came to it because they had nowhere else to go, and that the thing they offered each other was not only love but the specific form of being needed that each of them required. Love and necessity, in the Shibata household, are so thoroughly entwined that neither the film nor its characters can tell where one ends and the other begins.
Shoplifters, written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018. It follows a makeshift family in a cramped Tokyo home: Hatsue, an elderly woman who owns the house and supports the household on her late husband’s pension; Osamu and Nobuyo, a couple who supplement their low-wage jobs with small-scale shoplifting; Aki, a young woman who works at a peep-show establishment; Shota, a boy Osamu and Nobuyo took in years ago after finding him abandoned; and Yuri, a small girl they find shivering on a neighbour’s balcony, burn marks on her arms, and bring home for dinner, and then keep. None of them are related. All of them perform, with evident warmth and genuine feeling, the rituals of family life. The film is, for most of its running time, a remarkably tender document of people who have assembled something real from what the world left them.
The Japanese title is Manbiki Kazoku: “shoplifting family.” It carries a double meaning that the English title loses — “a family that steals” but also “stealing a family.” Kore-eda has spoken about this duality as central to the film’s argument. It is. What he may not have seen is that it also names the film’s unresolved question.
| Director | Hirokazu Kore-eda |
|---|---|
| Year | 2018 |
| Runtime | 121 minutes |
| Cast | Lily Franky, Sakura Ando, Kirin Kiki, Kairi Jō, Miyu Sasaki, Mayu Matsuoka |
| Award | Palme d’Or, Cannes 2018 |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel, MUBI |
Every member of the Shibata family joined it because they had nowhere else. Hatsue, widowed and visited only by the stepchild she scams for money, needed not to die alone. Nobuyo, whose past the film releases slowly — she killed an abusive husband, and Osamu helped her disappear — needed someone who would keep her secret and love her anyway. Osamu needed someone to look up to him as a father, a role his actual life had not provided. Aki needed shelter from something the film only shadows. Shota needed parents. Yuri needed not to be cold and hurt and alone. These are real needs. The love that grew from meeting them is real love. The film is not wrong about this.
“The film’s warmth is so complete that it performs, for the audience, exactly what it accuses the state of failing to do for its characters: it sees them, it holds them, and it cannot bring itself to look at what that holding obscures.”
But the film cannot quite ask whether a family built entirely on mutual necessity — where each person is, at least in part, fulfilling the specific emotional role the others require of them — is the same as a family built on choice. This distinction only surfaces in the interrogation sequences, where the state’s cold, transactional reading of the Shibatas is offered as obviously wrong. The detective who asks Nobuyo if she loved Yuri is positioned as reductive and unfeeling. The state cannot see what the film can see. But the state’s question is not entirely off. The film’s most honest answer to whether Nobuyo loved Yuri is Nobuyo’s answer: the girl reached for me, and I held on. Which is love. Which is also not quite the same as choosing someone freely.
The last image of Yuri is the film’s most devastating, and its most unresolved. She has been returned to her biological parents, who the film has shown are neglectful and possibly worse. She stands on the balcony — the same balcony where Osamu first found her — and looks back in the direction of the Shibata house. The film frames this as a pure indictment of the system that separated them. It is that. It is also an image the film cannot interpret. Because the film cannot say what should have happened. The Shibatas were not her parents. They took a child without telling anyone, without any legal standing, without a plan for what her life would look like if Hatsue died, or if Osamu lost his job, or if Yuri grew old enough to ask questions. The love was real. The situation was not sustainable. The film knows both these things and cannot hold them simultaneously, so it gives us Yuri’s gaze and lets the ache do the work.
The film to place alongside this one — already invoked in our Parasite review, where Shoplifters was called as a counterpoint to the Kims’ upward aspiration — is Kore-eda’s own Nobody Knows (2004), made fourteen years earlier and based on a real Tokyo case in which four children were abandoned by their mother and left to survive alone in an apartment for months. The comparison is not comfortable, and that is precisely why it belongs here. In Nobody Knows, the children’s improvised family — built from the same materials as the Shibatas’, from need and from love and from the absence of any other option — is a tragedy. The state’s failure to intervene is catastrophic. The love among the children is real and it is not enough. In Shoplifters, the state’s intervention is the tragedy. The love among the Shibatas is real and it is treated as sufficient, or very nearly. The two films use the same materials to reach almost opposite conclusions about whether love without structure can hold. Neither film can be entirely right. The gap between them is where the argument lives.
Shoplifters is among the finest films of the century so far. Sakura Ando’s performance in the interrogation scenes alone would be enough to establish this. Kore-eda’s ability to make warmth feel earned rather than sentimentalized, to let the camera simply watch people be present with each other, is unmatched in contemporary cinema. The film is not wrong that the Shibatas loved each other. It is not wrong that Yuri was better off with them than on the cold balcony. What it cannot quite do is ask whether love, in the absence of any other resource, is still freely chosen — or whether it becomes, at some point, the only available shelter. These are not the same thing. The film holds them together with such tenderness that it takes a moment, after the credits, to notice the seam.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2004): Kore-eda’s earlier film about children forming their own family in the absence of the adults who should be there — and the point at which love without structure runs out. The contrast with Shoplifters is one of the most revealing things either film can show you about the other.
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019): reviewed previously on this blog — the film we used Shoplifters to illuminate, and which illuminates it in return. Where the Kims look up the hill with longing, the Shibatas never look up at all. The distance between those two films is the distance between aspiration and survival.
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