Hirokazu Kore-eda grew up in a very small house. “I didn’t have a room of my own,” said the Japanese auteur at the winners’ press conference in Cannes last week, shortly after winning his first Palme d’Or for Manbiki Kazuko (Shoplifters) . All that Kore-eda had as a child, to keep his treasures, school books and playthings, as well as his ideas and dreams, was a cupboard. “I used to observe the adult world from the small door of that little cupboard,” he said. Years later, 55-year-old Kore-eda continues to observe the world; now from behind the lens of the camera.
Adults and children, families and relationships form the enduring core of his films. His latest exploration on the subject, Shoplifters, is about a family of thieves that takes a little girl under its wings. Hurt and abused in her biological home, she clings to the affection which comes from her new parents and siblings. Can this love last a lifetime or is it just a short tryst?
Behind its unassuming facade, Kore-eda’s straight and simple tale hides a rare complexity of thought and craft. There is a seeming sense of fun to start with, in the ingenuity of the thieves in running away with things from neighbourhood stores. But it gets progressively dark and edgy. There is quietude, gentleness, poignancy and a humane and contemplative tone; yet the film is devastating in its final impact. All the while Kore-eda never disengages from his audience but carries them along on the ride; Shoplifters gnaws at the collective heart of the audience for a long while.
Image reinforced
Often called the true inheritor of the legacy of Yasujirō Ozu, Kore-eda has been candid about putting familial ties persistently under the scanner. “I am thought of as a director who makes films about families and I guess this award will reinforce that image,” said Kore-eda. But with Shoplifters, he has also tried to broaden the scope of the subject. “I am looking at the family from a greater distance to highlight the friction between family and society,” he said. “I wanted to integrate my characters into contemporary society, [place them] in a broader social context.”
Kore-eda deepens his exploration of the family unit in a whole new way. He raises a significant and complex moral question: Is an adopted family any less than the real one?
The many questions
“The question at the heart of the film is whether families are built on blood ties or do they take shape because people spend time together. Can there still be a link without being biological parent-child?” he asks rhetorically. Over and above the petty crime, he seeks to find the “special link”. “I wanted to depict the sentiments, emotions, wealth, richness and colour this family [of criminals] conveyed.”
The bigger issue, however, is whether society will allow an alternative construct to the traditional one. Kore-eda rips into the traditional family structure. It’s the “normal” families that are dysfunctional. Redemption seems to lie in the informal cobbling together of individuals into family-like units. But is the innocence of a surrogate family as pure and untainted as it seems? Is there any escape from betrayals and disappointments? Kore-eda doesn’t offer convenient answers.
In press interactions, Kore-eda comes across as a scrupulous, thorough person; the kind who pauses on questions, thinks and rationalises them through, and measures his words carefully. In his new film, he is disruptive, subversive and devastating at one level, yet never violent, hostile or raging when he takes on the institution of the family. He questions it but also sees the futility of entirely negating it.
For his family of crooks, it’s all about a second chance. They have been failures in earlier relationships. “[For them] it’s all about trying again and creating something like a family,” as Kore-eda says.
Private issues
The specific in the universal and the universal in the specific in Shoplifters was also reflected in the other Palme d’Or contenders this year. The engagement with outcasts and themes of abandonment and adoption, the nature of real and proxy families echoed in Nadine Labaki’s Capharnaüm (Lebanon), Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Ayka (Russia) and Abu Bakr Shawky’s Yomeddine (Egypt); the themes of paternity, father-son/ daughter relationship played out in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree (Turkey), Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows (Spanish) and, in its own unique way, in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (South Korea).
Shoplifters also harks back to and assimilates from Kore-eda’s own work from the past. Nobody Knows (2004) was about children being abandoned and creating an alternative unit themselves. In Like Father, Like Son (2013) too, he masterfully explored the theme of biological and adopted children, while the father-son bond and parental responsibilities were beautifully brought out in After The Storm (2016) .
Kore-eda is no stranger to Cannes. Nobody Knows won Yuya Yagira the best actor trophy in 2004. Air Doll (2009) debuted in the Un Certain Regard section that year. Like Father, Like Son was a Palme d’Or contender and eventually won Kore-eda the Jury prize in 2013. Our Little Sister (2015) too competed for the Palme d’Or and After The Storm was featured in the Un Certain Regard category in 2016.
“People feel that after many years, you no longer feel excited, anxious or stressed out [about Cannes],” he said. But Kore-eda still does. He feels he has changed over the years, as have families and his vision of them — one reason the theme will never go out of fashion for him. “When I am 60 or 70, I am sure I can still continue to make films on families.”
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
Published - May 26, 2018 04:48 pm IST
