Family life

Lucky are those who get to choose their own family,” says Sakura Ando’s character in the Japanese movie Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In that vast mountain range called modern Japanese cinema, director Hirokazu Kore’eda is to me its highest peak. It’s very pleasing that a master of disturbingly relevant cinema won the top gong in France for a movie about human love in this Large Hadron Collider-like 21st century.

I don’t want to reveal too much about what happens when a middle-aged couple and a young boy start living with an old lady and her granddaughter. But time and destiny collide precisely when they adopt a neglected girl from the streets of Tokyo. This ragtag family, which supplements its meagre income with some shoplifting, warms up to the little girl, only to find themselves in a thick legal soup.

As someone who has been a completist about Kore'eda's work, I find Shoplifters an indicator of the auteur's work having come full circle. The movie shares much with the themes from his 2004 masterpiece, Nobody Knows. Both are sentimentality-averse and have young kids at the heart of the story, unlike his more recent works such as After the Storm and Our Little Sister. 

However, unlike Nobody Knows, Kore’eda infuses Shoplifters with a melancholic hilarity. The granddaughter works at a sex shop as a semi-nudist, which her grandma makes fun of by heaving her own bosom. For this viewer, the fact that this was Kirin Kiki’s last movie before her death is a bittersweet realisation. But the grand dame of Japanese cinema couldn’t have asked for a better farewell. Her wide-eyed toothless grin tinged with wistfulness was a joy to behold in last year’s After the Storm and is even more pronounced in Shoplifters. The movie’s most tender moments involve her and the runaway five-year-old Miyu Sasaki, who is heartbreakingly gentle and brings to life every scar of her tumultuous childhood. These scenes are also a grim reminder that Japan is currently fighting a losing battle with dwindling demographic dividend.

Lily Franky as the paterfamilias becomes a character you root for by the end of this clever, humane, compassionately directed and faultlessly acted movie.

Speaking of a couple trying to forge a family, I’m reminded of Tamara Jenkins’ latest movie, Private Life, which was made available on Netflix last month. A 40-something Manhattan-based artist couple Richard and Rachel (Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn, in bleakly pristine form) decide that the time is nigh for them to have a baby and get a family going. The only hitch is that their wear-and-tear life has made them borderline unfit to conceive a baby together and need “outside” help — IVF — and Richard’s niece Sadie (Kayli Carter) offers to donate her eggs.

Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or at Cannes

One hopes Jenkins’s cicada-like output gets a bump up and leads to more films because she has such an original voice. The humour is understated in Private Life and tends to be near-incomprehensible for those not clued into the New York City artsy scene. There are references to everything from Scandinavian literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgård to an obscure arts journal like Tin House. That said, what could have been a daintily pretentious story instead turns out to be a hilarious meditation on the human condition in 21st-century America.

There’s a beautiful scene where the couple goes through an online list of IVF donors, which Hahn calls “eBay for ova”, and try to zero in on who would be a good fit. “She’s got a BA in journalism and cinema studies. No wonder she’s selling her eggs. She can’t get a job,” says Hahn.

Or, Hahn: “Double major, philosophy and political science, at an East Coast Ivy League university.”

Giamatti: “Too indimidating.”

Hahn: “Yeah, your sperm might be a little shy around her eggs.”

It's this whip-smart dialogue that makes one ignore the medical gobbledygook attached to the IVF procedure that the lead characters spout once in a while. After all, it’s the most brilliantly goofy American movie of 2018.

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