‘Shoplifters’, Imagining Love

What freedom do those who lie on the margins of society have? This is the implicit question that is posed throughout Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s film Shoplifters, which received a Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. This feature film immerses the viewer into the everyday existence of a family, the Shibatas, the five of whom live in a small wooden house that sometimes represents a claustrophobic atmosphere to suppress the cold winter days and other times a paradise swathed in light when the warm weather returns. Their daily life is composed of petty theft and schemes to try to survive in a society and a city that keep them cornered in their precarious situation, as suggested in the film’s Japanese title Manbiki kazoku, literally ‘shoplifting family’. 

Indeed, this is how the narrative begins. In the middle of a supermarket, a child and a man the viewer believes to be their father use various codes and tricks to get as many provisions into their rucksack before leaving the store and heading back out into the city. As they do, they encounter a little girl alone on a balcony in the cold of winter. After offering her something to eat, they take her to their home for a hot meal and a little solace. Thus, the question arises as to whether they should keep the little girl with them or take her back home. 

Forging one’s own connections

Shoplifters examines the topic of love, the kind inherited from a familial relationship and the kind we forge with others, living together. Hirokazu Kore-eda, driven by the music of Haruomi Hosono, also raises the issue of compliance with social rules and the blows suffered by those who try to evade them by living on the fringes and reinventing the very definition of relationships.

When one of the protagonists is told by the old woman who owns the house, played by Kirin Kiki, that we cannot choose our parents, she whispers a sentence that could be said to sum up the film’s entire message: ‘Precisely, it’s much stronger when we choose them ourselves.’ Shoplifters is a film that examines the strength of choice, the choices we make ourselves and those that are made for us. 

Shoplifters (2018), a film directed by Hirozaku Kore-eda and available on BFI Player.