Penbugs
Cinema

Shoplifters[2018]: A sincere reminder to be grateful for the things in life that are taken for granted

A family is something in life you can’t choose by yourself. You can’t choose your parents and siblings. You can’t swap your family when you just don’t feel one of them. It is something that you have to work with what you have got, even when it’s a kind of family that throws you away when you hit the old age, when you’re of no value , even when you don’t feel the emotional contact, You just simply can’t – or that’s what this society dictates. But what if there is a chance to choose our own family in such case, why we need this society to validate our choices, to live our own life as we please. Shoplifters is a heartfelt reminder of such things in life.

A young boy, Shota, enjoys shoplifting with a man who fills the father figure in his life. He has a knack for it and doesn’t feel the guilt. The boy, the man and his wife share the roof with an old woman who owns that house with her granddaughter and form themselves as a family. Shoplifters is a wonderful drama that rends our hearts more when it is viewed through the eyes of the little girl in the film, Lin – though that’s not her real name, she feels like herself with this made-up name, a name she chose for herself and not shoved at her.

Lin, a 5 year old little girl, gets a mother in this made-up family who doesn’t beat her up for no reason, who doesn’t traumatize her because her own life doesn’t seem holding together. She gets a loving grandmother who tends to her scars in a way a mother would. She gets an elder brother who would protect her from any harm that comes her way, who puts her life and wellness before his own. Lin, though she shares this tiny space of a home in this chosen family, she feels that she has witnessed the vast universe in a shiny marble that’s lit by a torchlight than she does in her warm, cozy home. She feels forsaken in her own house, with her own mother.

The abandonment and the shenanigans in a seemingly “perfect” family in this society are turned a blind eye and tyrannize the ways how a life should be lived, even when it barely provides the means for it, even when it doesn’t provide a thriving environment to live. This self-chosen family welcomes the uncertainty in their means of living, the wrongness in the way they choose to live. Though everything about their livelihood is an anomalous situation, they thrive in it. They just spend their nights looking at fireworks on the sky when all their means of life could go away in a snap. They don’t aim for minimalism, they are greedy to live their life to the fullest. They tend to find the calmness among chaos.

Sayaka, the granddaughter, who leaves her parents to live with her granny, shares a beautiful bond with the latter than she does with her parents. The parents, who likes to hide the fact that they’re not in contact with their daughter, maintains a facade. It is witnessed in the scene when she badly longs for a warm wrap of human contact around her when she spends her time getting to know a strange man.

Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Shoplifters reminds us of the warm wraps of hugs we got when we haven’t asked for it in life. It reminds us of the loving relationships that we haven’t paid our attentions to. And it hits a strong, striking chord when it reminds us of the love that we have lost, because that is not anomalous. The last frame of Lin in the film, who waits at the gate of her house for her chosen family to take her away once again while sharing the roof with her birth mother, says it all.