Shoplifters

16/10/2024

Film    Download PDF  

The Textures of Cinema

    One of the many ways film can be commercial is through cynicism. This isn’t only or even especially the pragmatic assumptions producers will make about the amount of sex or violence a film should contain, or which actors can capture a given demographic through race, gender or a particular film territory. It may not even rest on the need for a happier ending than the film’s integrity demands but that the filmmakers believe the audience will want. Often its success rests much more on what the characters want, and often cynically so. 

     Various comparisons have been made between two Palm D’Or winners (Shoplifters in 2018; Parasite the following year) — with both films focusing on poorer families getting by using various scams. However, the major difference is that one is cynically motivated and the other sentimentally inclined. It is the difference between logic and pathos, with Parasite making clear in its early stages what the family needs to do to infiltrate a rich household; in Shoplifters, we don’t discover till late in the film many of the motivations behind the characters’ behaviour. By following closely the cynical motivations of the Kims in Parasite as they plot to remove the people already working for the rich Park family, the film shows how clever they are when they frame the chauffeur and dispose of the housekeeper. The audience is placed in the perspective of their cynicism, and director Bong Joo-ho allows us to retain our sympathy because they are poor people who have found a way of getting by. In Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters, the emphasis initially isn’t on the logic of their deeds but on the pathos of their actions. We needn’t exaggerate this difference (the opening sequence in Shoplifters can seem very cynical indeed) but it is important for at least two reasons: to recognise that the films are very tonally distinct and that one leads to a greater density; the other a levity that can seem brilliant yet superficial.

          Any further similarities made between the two films won't be to offer a constant compare and contrast; it is only to bring out the textural significance of Koreeda’s film and the thematic weight it subsequently possesses. If Parasite feels much more consumable than Shoplifters it rests partly on this relative lightness. Its conceit is as clever as the characters and consistent with them, and the film accumulates complications they have to resolve, while the film simultaneously works as a critique of injustice, even if the Park family are far from terrible people. The Parks just happen to be dimly unaware of their good fortune and have a bad habit in contemporaneous terms of failing to check their privilege. When a terrible storm leaves the Kims’ basement flooded and they are left sleeping on a gym floor with hundreds of others, the gap between the rich and the poor becomes too great and a casual remark by Mr Park leads Mr Kim to kill him, ‘triggered’ (in another fashionable term) by a comment on his smell. Parasite, for various other reasons too, moves towards melodramatic escalation; Shoplifters towards a more nuanced reappraisal. This needn’t mean subtlety is always better than overkill (better Paul Verhoeven than James Ivory). However, Shoplifters is constantly asking us to think anew a given situation within a complex ethical framework, while Parasite accumulates narrative force that it then dispels in exaggerated zeal. 

       Shoplifters opens with an illustration of its very title. A young boy and what we will assume is his father enter a supermarket, separate and while the father puts various items into a basket, the boy starts putting them into his bag. When it looks like staff might be looking on, the father plonks his basket on a trolley, hiding the boy’s actions. The boy departs and the father leaves the basket. The film cuts to them presumably hours later. The theft took place in daylight; it is now the evening. As we increasingly discover, Osamu Shibata (Lily Franky) is not the boy’s father yet Shota (Kairi Jō) is very much part of the family, one that a couple of scenes later incorporates a new member when on their way home they see a young girl, Yuri (Miyu Sasak) they often see alone on a neighbouring balcony. They take her in to eat with them and decide she must stay when they see that she has  various scars. 

    Nobody reports her missing and she becomes part of the family unit: one that consists of now two young children, an older girl, Aki Shibata (Mayu Matsuoka) who is a sex worker, a couple — a construction worker, Osamu and a laundry service worker, Nobuyo Shibata (Sakura Ando) — and the grandmother, Hatsue (Kirin Kiki). Before the conclusion, the film shows there are almost no biological connections between them, yet instead of this appearing like a clever manipulation of the material, it shows a director fascinated by creating familial bonds that we take as given until Koreeda unravels them in a series of intricate revelations. Hatsue isn’t Aki’s grandmother but there is a link: Aki is the grandchild of her husband, and the consequences of an affair. Osamu and Noboyu are a couple but this is because they have killed Noboyu’s husband — a crime they committed otherwise the husband would have killed them. The courts have agreed. Their relationship with the grandmother has been partly mercenary; they have all been living off her pension. 

       However, if Koreeda insists one sees the film ethically rather than cynically, with compassion rather than cold reasoning, it rests on a question that has come up again and again in his work. What is a family and what are the implications of it upon children? In his first and very fine feature Mabarosi, a husband dies and the wife remarries, bringing up her child with a widower in an arranged marriage. In I Wish, two brothers are separated, in Our Little Sister a stepsister is incorporated into the family, in Like Father, Like Son, parents find that the child they have brought up is not theirs after confusion years earlier at the hospital. Do they keep the son they have nurtured, or the one nature intended? In Nobody Knows, four half-siblings find themselves left alone in an apartment trying to function as a makeshift family after the mother leaves and doesn’t return. Koreeda reckons “It’s probably not so much a question of what I think and how I feel about the family. I didn’t want to present such a stark choice [in Shoplifters]. I think there are different ways of looking at the question. It’s not “Which is stronger?” but “Is blood enough to make you a family?” (BFI) 

    This is probably Koreeda's most narratively complex or at least complicated approach to the question, and one not all Koreeda admirers have appreciated. “The film’s problems are laid out in the initial scenes; namely that Kore-eda is making an action-oriented and plotted film, rather than making one of introspection and experience” Julian Garcia says, adding: “Kore-eda excels at creating depth and reflection, so his abilities are restricted with the content and form in Shoplifters. There is no poetry in the action, no beauty in the framing.” Certainly next to Mabarosi, the film can seem too obvious in its mise ene scene and plainly lit. After all, Maborosi means light of an illusion, and the film was set in a town, Wajima, of 27,000 people. However, this suggests a different lighting scheme and mise en scene were required for the hectic Tokyo suburb where Shoplifters is located. Also, while Maborosi contains the familial within the solitary, paying much attention to the wife’s grief, Shoplifters, like the later Broker, makes much of people’s escape from solitude in the makeshift and the contingently convivial, with Koreeda interested in how families are nurturingly made rather than biologically given. 

       If we have drawn comparisons with Parasite it rests on this question of plot and action that Garcia believes leads to Koreeda making one his weakest films, while our take is closer to one where he takes these elements and doesn’t drive the story with them but retrospectively asks us to re-perceive them, to achieve a different type of introspection from the slow, reflective elements we find, in different ways, in Maborosi, Afterlife, Distant and Nobody Knows, those earlier works that contain greater mystery than the more recent films. However, pointing out differences with the ostensibly similar Parasite, we can distinguish between narrative drive and narrative texture. The Korean film is driven by its story; Shoplifters is contained by its narrative. One way of understanding this is to muse over the speculative aspect of the films. In Parasite much of the speculation is anticipated and resolved: how will the Kims manage to get rid of the chauffeur and the maid; how will they manage to get out of the house when the Parks return after getting caught in the storm; why is the maid on her return to the house determined to go back down into the basement? The film creates questions it then very skilfully answers, and partly why it is useful to see it as more about logos than pathos, more about reasoning procedures than emotional engagement.

            Shoplifters creates a more observational approach to narrative, leading the viewer to think about the interconnections rather than anticipating expected outcomes. Even once we have discovered that neither Nobuyo and Osamu are related to the grandmother, we are still left wondering about that developing bond, just as we are left with questions over their affair and her husband’s death. And what about the details behind Shota’s abandonment by his parents, and why Yuri's parents didn’t report her missing? Nobuyo and Osamu’s affair is worthy of a film noir. Yuri’s relationship with her parents could too have been a specific drama, as Shota’s parents leaving him could have been another, while Hatsue’s husband’s affair that produced a child could have been another film again. Those who like their dramas tight will see a lot of dangling material, but if plot is chiefly there to serve a problematic over an audience’s sense of gratification, then a story’s apparent loose ends can be the development of a film’s thematic texture. As long as these elements remain vital to the theme, they strengthen instead of weaken the density of a work. All these questions we have offered and that aren’t answered within the plot are part of the film’s broader speculative field, a field much greater than in Parasite. The viewer probably feels no need to ask questions about the Parks’ parents, nor how the Kims found themselves living in a basement.  While we might wonder if Hatsue couldn’t have children and thus the husband had a child with someone else (adding pathos to the family she then surrounds herself with), who is likely to ask this question of the housekeeper in Parasite?   

     Reviewers may make much of three-dimensional characters in film, but viewed from the perspective of the questions one may have around the characters’ existence, it can be more than a critical claim; it can be an analytic proposition.  Jason Hellerman thinks, “a one-dimensional character is someone who lacks depth and who never seems to learn or grow throughout the story. They have one purpose, do not arc or change, and just come out the other side just as they went in. But if you think your character is not fully fleshed out, I have good news for you. There is a way to turn your one-dimensional character into a three-dimensional character. It just involves a lot of rewriting.” (No Film School) Both claims are debatable. The first is countered by William Friedkin, in an amusing anecdote about Nick Nolte on Blue Chips.  “When I did a film with him called Blue Chips with Nick, he gave me a novel about his character. It had a lot of interesting things, but I couldn’t validate any of them, so I just said, “Oh, yeah, this is great, Nick!” He felt confident he was on the right track. I have no idea how he used that stuff, but I was confident he did.” (Film School Rejects) It might have been useful for Nolte but didn’t add anything to the character in the film, no matter what it did for Nolte playing the role. Equally, a character needs to be transformed if this is what the story is about. Harry Callahan doesn’t change one bit in Dirty Harry and it wouldn’t have been a better film if he had. Different yes — but not necessarily better. Charles Bronson changes a lot more in Death Wish (a mild-mannered architect turns into a slaughtering machine) but if Dirty Harry isn’t always so great, Death Wish is a lot worse. If anything, Callahan with his ex-wife passed away, his present life apparently one of celibacy, and his devotion to a job he doesn’t always believe in, makes him potentially a more complex character than Bronson’s grieving husband who avenges without much discrimination his wife’s death and his daughter’s sexual assault.  

   It isn’t so important to write pages and pages about a character’s life, just as it isn’t always the case that a character change indicates any added complexity. How then does a filmmaker suggest three dimensions? Shoplifters does so allusively, by indicating that these characters have lives before the start of the diegesis that is important to the story but will not be the focus of it. We may speculate over Hatsue’s childlessness as we won’t over the housekeeper’s past in Parasite, because any past that is important to the latter's actions will be played out clearly. She needed the job working for the Parks, since she needed to keep her husband hidden in the basement and away from loan sharks. The film creates functional narrative components and matches the character’s back story to them, leaving speculation unnecessary. In contrast, Shoplifters has us wondering about motives that lead to actions. Whether it is Hatsue taking in Nobuyo and Osamu, the parents who leave Shota, or why Yuri’s parents don’t report her missing, the film offers actions without clear motives. We know that certain actions or non-actions take place, but we aren’t always sure why. It wouldn’t be enough to say Yuri’s parents wanted rid of her, though overall they do, just as it would be too simple to say that Nobuyo and Osamu only wish to exploit Hatsue, though exploitation is involved. Through a mixture of motivational ambivalence and elliptical telling, Koreeda creates complexity of character. We know that Nobuyo and Osumo need to survive and Hatsue’s home and pension help, but they also care about this woman. This is partly because of the perception we have of their relationship long before we know the truth of it. They act with Hatsue as if they are part of her family and this isn’t a ruse (they needn’t act since nobody is watching): this is what they feel. As for offscreen space, or more precisely events to which the viewer isn’t privy, near the end of the film with Yuri back home. She watches her mother applying make-up. Her mother also has a healing scab on her face that Yuri touches and her mother tells her not to do that; she doesn’t like to be touched and Yuri shrinks away. We don’t know why the mark is there, but we can assume it has been administered by Yuri’s father. Perhaps her mother wasn’t just rejecting Yuri by allowing her to go missing, without reporting her absence, but protecting her from the sort of violence she herself is a victim of. The mother isn’t presented sympathetically in these moments (even when she tries to ingratiate herself with the hurt Yuri by saying she will buy her some clothes) but what might have seemed like an act of cruelty (abandoning her child) could be read as an act of consideration. One needn’t make too much of this speculative aspect; it is more whether a film invites it, creating characters that through a combination of events to which we don’t have access, and the complexity of a person’s motivations, they become three-dimensional.  

         Some may see that Koreeda isn’t offering three-dimensionality but messy characterisation. When he admits “…we started shooting in the summer, the truth is the script wasn’t really finished. I hadn’t really had a complete script by that point and we shot it anyways because we thought we might need it” (The Moveable Fest), this could add to the claim. But this would be to misconstrue the difference between confusion and ambiguity — that an unfinished script usually lacks something; Koreeda’s problem (which needn’t be seen as one) is one of profusion. It has a surfeit of something. A script with holes in it is a typical example of the former. Ken Miyamoto reckons there are five types of plot holes: the MacGuffin: “Inconsistencies regarding the plot device of MacGuffins, which are desired goals, objects, or any motivators that protagonists seek out for whatever reason.” There are too, logic plot holes: “when story points are not logical either in the context of the real world or the rules that the screenwriters and filmmakers set up.” We also have character plot holes: “Inconsistent character choices, random abilities presented out of the blue to solve a conflict, etc.” This is similar to narrative plot holes: “Gaps or inconsistencies in the storyline.” Finally, there are Deus Ex Machina plot holes: “Where a seemingly unsolvable or unsurvivable conflict is solved by the intervention of some new character, ability, or object.” (The Script Lab) Some look like they share characteristics with others: the Deux Ex Machina of someone having an ability we only hear about when they have a problem to solve can seem like a character plot hole, with a sudden ability out of nowhere to resolve a conflict. But what is clear in most of these instances, is that another script draft would help: for example introducing earlier in the film a couple of references to a skill that can then come into play during the conclusion. Usually, a MacGuffin is fine and Hitchcock loved them: Britton Perelman notes that in The 39 Steps, “the protagonist gets entangled in a plot that revolves around very important military secrets. What exactly those secrets are is far less important than their role in getting the protagonist involved in the espionage drama.” Or as Hitchcock put it: “the things the spies are after.” (The Script Lab) Plot holes are usually questions of narrative drive over narrative texture, and can be resolved with further re-writes. However, the narrative texture Koreeda seeks does not work off script logic because the emphasis isn’t on the mutually incompatible but the mutually possible. This doesn’t mean script work can’t help, though it might not be vital in the same way. 

        We can take, once again, Parasite as our point of comparison. We know exactly why the Kims finagle their way into the Parks’ house and the film demonstrates the skill in which they do so. Getting rid of the housekeeper by playing on her peach allergy; removing the chauffeur by giving the impression he has been using the family car for sexual encounters. We know why the Kims do it and exactly how they do it. The film needs plausibly to present the motive and the deed. In Shopkeepers, motive and deed are far more anfractuous as Nobuyo and Osumo don’t simply move in and take advantage of the grandmother, the parents aren’t just trying to offload Yuri onto others, and Osumo isn’t just interested in Shota as a useful addition to his work as a thief. And this isn’t because the characters change; it is because their feelings and circumstances are complex. Koreeda doesn’t quite tell us what they were like before the start of the story and, in the last thirty minutes, unravels aspects of that past without creating in the viewer certitude over it. When the detectives interview Aki, Shota and Yuri it isn’t especially to tell them the truth (and thus the viewer) but to get the information they need. When they tell Aki that Hatsue was receiving money from her parents in return for keeping her under Hatsue’s roof, this is a useful claim the police offer all the better to get Aki to tell them where Hatsue is buried. But it seems countered by an earlier scene where it is true Hatsue received money from Aki’s parents, though this wasn’t because she was pocketing cash in return for looking after Aki. Her parents didn't seem to know where she was, and Hatsui was receiving money because her father’s mistress’s son — and Aki’s father — felt guilty about his mother stealing Hatsou’s husband from her. When the officers speak to Aki about Nobuyo and Osumo, they tell her that they stabbed, buried and killed Nobuyo’s husband, but what they don’t tell her is that this was an act of self-defence as readily as a crime of passion. The police want information over the truth, and the viewer is left working with contrary perspectives rather than absolute knowledge. The film proposes that Hatsou, Nobuyo and Osumo act out of a mixture of self-interest and emotional need, evident when we find out that Nobuyo is unable to have children of her own. 

     It isn’t so much that characters change which creates three-dimensionality but that they possess mixed motives — far more common in life than radical transformations in character. What Koreeda offers in Shoplifting is a mixture of clear throughlines and fuzzy edges. Sure, we know by the end this isn’t a large family which has semi-adopted Yuri, but a makeshift one made up of a mixture of needs and pragmatic self-interest. Parasite is almost exclusively a work of pragmatic self-interest and has no need for those fuzzy edges and, consequently, most of the questions we are inclined to ask about it are over logical plot points. In contrast, Koreeda is constantly looking for this fuzziness. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong but I don’t actually sit down and write all the details about each character, their whole history. If you were to attend a screenwriting course, often they’d tell you to sit down and define each character before writing the script.” He adds, “I don’t believe in that, I don't think character development is the way to go. For me it’s the relationships. The relationship between one person and the person standing in front of them. It’s the way they move, the way they react, and how they relate to each other.” (The Film Experience)

        The film proposes character isn’t simultaneously coherent and malleable but inconstant and durable. Often when a film offers a twist it does so to show that a character isn’t who we thought they were — the femme fatale in Body Heat, the socialite in Jagged Edge, Emily in Side Effects and both main characters in Gone Girl. In Shoplifters, it is more that the situation isn’t what we thought it was, and this allows the film to retain what is an important aspect of almost of Koreeda’s work: a feeling for the individual without emphasising individuality, which in turn becomes almost a political position: “…a lot of crimes happen in Japan, but people tend to view crime as a matter of individual responsibility. They see it as this or that person’s fault, rather than something born[e] out of society and social ills. So they just punish that person – because it’s that person’s fault, his individual responsibility – they treat it as nothing more than that. That’s how they solve the problem in Japan.” (BFI) It is also how films often solve their problems. In Jagged Edge, for example, the socialite is or isn’t guilty, individually responsible or not culpable at all, and this is typical of most crime thrillers that play on plot twists and character transformations. But Shoplifters proposes that the adult characters are both innocent and guilty, depending on the given act and the given angle. From a newspaper perspective, this would be a story about a murderous couple kidnapping other people’s children and burying an old woman — who herself only took in an indirect relative so that she could make a bit of extra money. But while the couple are murderous and do bury the grandmother, just as the grandmother does take cash from Aki’s parents, this is only half the story, with Koreeda’s film proposing that the advantage of narrative texture over narrative drive is that you can tell a whole story without the viewer paradoxically knowing for sure the details of every event. We will never know whether Nobuyo and Osumo killed her husband out of calculation or desperation, and never know if Hatsou’s husband left her because (like Nobuyo) she couldn’t have kids. It is what happens when a film offers the complexity of character in the context of the texture of narrative.

     In reviewing the film negatively, Garcia may believe Koreeda is making an action-oriented and plotted film but we are more inclined to see one of introspection and experience. Garcia also adds Koreeda "excels at creating depth and reflection, so his abilities are restricted with the content and form in Shoplifters." (Siblin) But we might agree with him about the framing, even if for different reasons. Garcia views it as a problem of beauty and poetry. However, if we were to criticise the film it wouldn’t be that it lacks beauty or poetry, though it may, more that the film’s form doesn’t quite match the density of its content. The mise en scene is often contained by characterisational specifics rather than open to manifold perceptions and here we can think of Gilles Deleuze’s the saturated frame and David Bordwell’s idea of scenic density. These aren’t quite the same thing, but they can both be usefully adopted to comprehend the potential visual limitations of Koreeda’s film. Deleuze speaks of a saturated frame that is physical-dynamic, in contrast to emptier shots that play on the geometry of the frame over the fullness of information. In this dynamic frame it can reach the "...point where a secondary scene appears in the foreground while the main one happens in the background (Wyler), or where you can no longer even distinguish between the principal and the secondary (Altman)." (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image)

       It might be one of the potentially major differences between Shoplifters and Parasite, with Koreeda’s film keeping the frame busy, while Bong Joon-Ho often allows it to be rarefied. One isn’t better than the other, but if the film moves towards that saturation within a story full of the ambiguities of narrative texture over narrative drive, it can benefit from pushing this narrative density into the visually hectic and rich. This type of saturation is there as Deleuze notes in William Wyler and more so in Robert Altman, and we recently see it evident in some of the films by New Romanian directors, Cristian Mungui, and Cristi Puiu. Whether it is Altman’s M*A*S*H, or Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, Puiu’s Sierrenavada, or Mungiu’s RMN, these are works that insist the complexities they offer narratively will be matched by an equally complicated mise en scene. In Sierranavada, a family gather to commemorate the central character’s late father reduces him to just one of the characters within often densely packed frames in the family home. Characters are constantly entering and exiting the shot and sometimes Puiu follows one character only for the film to appear visually stranded, as though it isn’t quite where the action happens to be. A character wanders into one room and the character closes the door and the film leaves us outside the door in a suddenly empty hallway, before another character enters the frame and goes into the room. The camera hovers in the hall looking on, possessing a little bit of access because the character has offered the camera the opportunity by opening the door. 

     The film captures very well, formally, the intricacies of this family and its various tensions. Sierenevada (released a couple of years before Shoplifters), gives form to the limited information we have and makes it hard initially for us to try and comprehend who is who and the various details of their personalities. The film offers a constant sense of bewilderment, while Koreeda keeps his framing tight and simple, rarely making us search the frame informationally, no matter its saturation. When for example Koreeda shows us Shota in the background of a shot, stuck away in his cubbyhole in search of a bit of space and privacy, the film then cuts to a medium close-up of him reading. Though the frame is potentially one of saturated complexity, Koreeda often cuts or frames so that saturation is minimised.

       Scenic density is much more pragmatic than the saturated frame, and Deleuze writes about the latter to bring out the extremes: full and empty framing. (No matter the mention of Wyler - who might seem closer to scenic density over the saturated farme.) Bordwell wants to point out the careful craftsmanship of numerous filmmakers who like to use vivid, controlled mise en scene. “By scenic density I mean an approach to staging, shooting, and cutting in which selected details or areas change their status in the course of the action. I don’t count the bustle of background business, all that street traffic that is so much pictorial excelsior in our movies.” Bordwell insists the “shot keeps several items of dramatic significance salient in the composition.” (Observations On Film Art). This needn’t have the viewer scanning the frame for information; the film makes clear what we need to see but sometimes contains more than one important detail at a time (as opposed to editing, which would cut to each item of significance). Kurosawa’s High and Low is a good example,  with  Koreeda’s fellow, earlier compatriot creating a frame full and empty enough to allow the viewer to focus on different planes of meaning. After a boy is kidnapped, Kurosawa uses the widescreen frame and the large apartment the characters are in, to bring out without constant cutting the various characters’ positions on what should be done. 

     Koreeda’s film offers neither the saturation of Puiu nor the scenic density of Kurosawa, so while we wouldn’t agree with Garcia that it is a problem that Shoplifters lacks the visual poetry of Maborosi, for example,  we do feel that he hasn’t matched visual texture to narrative texture. When Osamu, Shota and Yuri steal a couple of fishing rods this could have been an example of scenic density, with Osamu in the foreground of the shot, discussing fishing materials with the shop worker, Shota in the middle ground stealing the rods and in the background Yuri yanking out the plug so that the alarm won't go off when he passes through the sliding doors. Instead, the film offers a series of cuts. When Trevor Johnston accurately notes that this “is much more layered”  (Sight and Sound) than some other Koreeda films of the last decade, it would have been an astonishing one if this layering had been incorporated much more into the mise en scene. This can seem like a quibble and perhaps in some ways it is. But at the same time, Koreeda’s film is so good that we might have wished it were better still, a work matching the texture of its narrative to an equally textured relationship to events within the frame.  

    

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Shoplifters

The Textures of Cinema

    One of the many ways film can be commercial is through cynicism. This isn’t only or even especially the pragmatic assumptions producers will make about the amount of sex or violence a film should contain, or which actors can capture a given demographic through race, gender or a particular film territory. It may not even rest on the need for a happier ending than the film’s integrity demands but that the filmmakers believe the audience will want. Often its success rests much more on what the characters want, and often cynically so. 

     Various comparisons have been made between two Palm D’Or winners (Shoplifters in 2018; Parasite the following year) — with both films focusing on poorer families getting by using various scams. However, the major difference is that one is cynically motivated and the other sentimentally inclined. It is the difference between logic and pathos, with Parasite making clear in its early stages what the family needs to do to infiltrate a rich household; in Shoplifters, we don’t discover till late in the film many of the motivations behind the characters’ behaviour. By following closely the cynical motivations of the Kims in Parasite as they plot to remove the people already working for the rich Park family, the film shows how clever they are when they frame the chauffeur and dispose of the housekeeper. The audience is placed in the perspective of their cynicism, and director Bong Joo-ho allows us to retain our sympathy because they are poor people who have found a way of getting by. In Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters, the emphasis initially isn’t on the logic of their deeds but on the pathos of their actions. We needn’t exaggerate this difference (the opening sequence in Shoplifters can seem very cynical indeed) but it is important for at least two reasons: to recognise that the films are very tonally distinct and that one leads to a greater density; the other a levity that can seem brilliant yet superficial.

          Any further similarities made between the two films won't be to offer a constant compare and contrast; it is only to bring out the textural significance of Koreeda’s film and the thematic weight it subsequently possesses. If Parasite feels much more consumable than Shoplifters it rests partly on this relative lightness. Its conceit is as clever as the characters and consistent with them, and the film accumulates complications they have to resolve, while the film simultaneously works as a critique of injustice, even if the Park family are far from terrible people. The Parks just happen to be dimly unaware of their good fortune and have a bad habit in contemporaneous terms of failing to check their privilege. When a terrible storm leaves the Kims’ basement flooded and they are left sleeping on a gym floor with hundreds of others, the gap between the rich and the poor becomes too great and a casual remark by Mr Park leads Mr Kim to kill him, ‘triggered’ (in another fashionable term) by a comment on his smell. Parasite, for various other reasons too, moves towards melodramatic escalation; Shoplifters towards a more nuanced reappraisal. This needn’t mean subtlety is always better than overkill (better Paul Verhoeven than James Ivory). However, Shoplifters is constantly asking us to think anew a given situation within a complex ethical framework, while Parasite accumulates narrative force that it then dispels in exaggerated zeal. 

       Shoplifters opens with an illustration of its very title. A young boy and what we will assume is his father enter a supermarket, separate and while the father puts various items into a basket, the boy starts putting them into his bag. When it looks like staff might be looking on, the father plonks his basket on a trolley, hiding the boy’s actions. The boy departs and the father leaves the basket. The film cuts to them presumably hours later. The theft took place in daylight; it is now the evening. As we increasingly discover, Osamu Shibata (Lily Franky) is not the boy’s father yet Shota (Kairi Jō) is very much part of the family, one that a couple of scenes later incorporates a new member when on their way home they see a young girl, Yuri (Miyu Sasak) they often see alone on a neighbouring balcony. They take her in to eat with them and decide she must stay when they see that she has  various scars. 

    Nobody reports her missing and she becomes part of the family unit: one that consists of now two young children, an older girl, Aki Shibata (Mayu Matsuoka) who is a sex worker, a couple — a construction worker, Osamu and a laundry service worker, Nobuyo Shibata (Sakura Ando) — and the grandmother, Hatsue (Kirin Kiki). Before the conclusion, the film shows there are almost no biological connections between them, yet instead of this appearing like a clever manipulation of the material, it shows a director fascinated by creating familial bonds that we take as given until Koreeda unravels them in a series of intricate revelations. Hatsue isn’t Aki’s grandmother but there is a link: Aki is the grandchild of her husband, and the consequences of an affair. Osamu and Noboyu are a couple but this is because they have killed Noboyu’s husband — a crime they committed otherwise the husband would have killed them. The courts have agreed. Their relationship with the grandmother has been partly mercenary; they have all been living off her pension. 

       However, if Koreeda insists one sees the film ethically rather than cynically, with compassion rather than cold reasoning, it rests on a question that has come up again and again in his work. What is a family and what are the implications of it upon children? In his first and very fine feature Mabarosi, a husband dies and the wife remarries, bringing up her child with a widower in an arranged marriage. In I Wish, two brothers are separated, in Our Little Sister a stepsister is incorporated into the family, in Like Father, Like Son, parents find that the child they have brought up is not theirs after confusion years earlier at the hospital. Do they keep the son they have nurtured, or the one nature intended? In Nobody Knows, four half-siblings find themselves left alone in an apartment trying to function as a makeshift family after the mother leaves and doesn’t return. Koreeda reckons “It’s probably not so much a question of what I think and how I feel about the family. I didn’t want to present such a stark choice [in Shoplifters]. I think there are different ways of looking at the question. It’s not “Which is stronger?” but “Is blood enough to make you a family?” (BFI) 

    This is probably Koreeda's most narratively complex or at least complicated approach to the question, and one not all Koreeda admirers have appreciated. “The film’s problems are laid out in the initial scenes; namely that Kore-eda is making an action-oriented and plotted film, rather than making one of introspection and experience” Julian Garcia says, adding: “Kore-eda excels at creating depth and reflection, so his abilities are restricted with the content and form in Shoplifters. There is no poetry in the action, no beauty in the framing.” Certainly next to Mabarosi, the film can seem too obvious in its mise ene scene and plainly lit. After all, Maborosi means light of an illusion, and the film was set in a town, Wajima, of 27,000 people. However, this suggests a different lighting scheme and mise en scene were required for the hectic Tokyo suburb where Shoplifters is located. Also, while Maborosi contains the familial within the solitary, paying much attention to the wife’s grief, Shoplifters, like the later Broker, makes much of people’s escape from solitude in the makeshift and the contingently convivial, with Koreeda interested in how families are nurturingly made rather than biologically given. 

       If we have drawn comparisons with Parasite it rests on this question of plot and action that Garcia believes leads to Koreeda making one his weakest films, while our take is closer to one where he takes these elements and doesn’t drive the story with them but retrospectively asks us to re-perceive them, to achieve a different type of introspection from the slow, reflective elements we find, in different ways, in Maborosi, Afterlife, Distant and Nobody Knows, those earlier works that contain greater mystery than the more recent films. However, pointing out differences with the ostensibly similar Parasite, we can distinguish between narrative drive and narrative texture. The Korean film is driven by its story; Shoplifters is contained by its narrative. One way of understanding this is to muse over the speculative aspect of the films. In Parasite much of the speculation is anticipated and resolved: how will the Kims manage to get rid of the chauffeur and the maid; how will they manage to get out of the house when the Parks return after getting caught in the storm; why is the maid on her return to the house determined to go back down into the basement? The film creates questions it then very skilfully answers, and partly why it is useful to see it as more about logos than pathos, more about reasoning procedures than emotional engagement.

            Shoplifters creates a more observational approach to narrative, leading the viewer to think about the interconnections rather than anticipating expected outcomes. Even once we have discovered that neither Nobuyo and Osamu are related to the grandmother, we are still left wondering about that developing bond, just as we are left with questions over their affair and her husband’s death. And what about the details behind Shota’s abandonment by his parents, and why Yuri's parents didn’t report her missing? Nobuyo and Osamu’s affair is worthy of a film noir. Yuri’s relationship with her parents could too have been a specific drama, as Shota’s parents leaving him could have been another, while Hatsue’s husband’s affair that produced a child could have been another film again. Those who like their dramas tight will see a lot of dangling material, but if plot is chiefly there to serve a problematic over an audience’s sense of gratification, then a story’s apparent loose ends can be the development of a film’s thematic texture. As long as these elements remain vital to the theme, they strengthen instead of weaken the density of a work. All these questions we have offered and that aren’t answered within the plot are part of the film’s broader speculative field, a field much greater than in Parasite. The viewer probably feels no need to ask questions about the Parks’ parents, nor how the Kims found themselves living in a basement.  While we might wonder if Hatsue couldn’t have children and thus the husband had a child with someone else (adding pathos to the family she then surrounds herself with), who is likely to ask this question of the housekeeper in Parasite?   

     Reviewers may make much of three-dimensional characters in film, but viewed from the perspective of the questions one may have around the characters’ existence, it can be more than a critical claim; it can be an analytic proposition.  Jason Hellerman thinks, “a one-dimensional character is someone who lacks depth and who never seems to learn or grow throughout the story. They have one purpose, do not arc or change, and just come out the other side just as they went in. But if you think your character is not fully fleshed out, I have good news for you. There is a way to turn your one-dimensional character into a three-dimensional character. It just involves a lot of rewriting.” (No Film School) Both claims are debatable. The first is countered by William Friedkin, in an amusing anecdote about Nick Nolte on Blue Chips.  “When I did a film with him called Blue Chips with Nick, he gave me a novel about his character. It had a lot of interesting things, but I couldn’t validate any of them, so I just said, “Oh, yeah, this is great, Nick!” He felt confident he was on the right track. I have no idea how he used that stuff, but I was confident he did.” (Film School Rejects) It might have been useful for Nolte but didn’t add anything to the character in the film, no matter what it did for Nolte playing the role. Equally, a character needs to be transformed if this is what the story is about. Harry Callahan doesn’t change one bit in Dirty Harry and it wouldn’t have been a better film if he had. Different yes — but not necessarily better. Charles Bronson changes a lot more in Death Wish (a mild-mannered architect turns into a slaughtering machine) but if Dirty Harry isn’t always so great, Death Wish is a lot worse. If anything, Callahan with his ex-wife passed away, his present life apparently one of celibacy, and his devotion to a job he doesn’t always believe in, makes him potentially a more complex character than Bronson’s grieving husband who avenges without much discrimination his wife’s death and his daughter’s sexual assault.  

   It isn’t so important to write pages and pages about a character’s life, just as it isn’t always the case that a character change indicates any added complexity. How then does a filmmaker suggest three dimensions? Shoplifters does so allusively, by indicating that these characters have lives before the start of the diegesis that is important to the story but will not be the focus of it. We may speculate over Hatsue’s childlessness as we won’t over the housekeeper’s past in Parasite, because any past that is important to the latter's actions will be played out clearly. She needed the job working for the Parks, since she needed to keep her husband hidden in the basement and away from loan sharks. The film creates functional narrative components and matches the character’s back story to them, leaving speculation unnecessary. In contrast, Shoplifters has us wondering about motives that lead to actions. Whether it is Hatsue taking in Nobuyo and Osamu, the parents who leave Shota, or why Yuri’s parents don’t report her missing, the film offers actions without clear motives. We know that certain actions or non-actions take place, but we aren’t always sure why. It wouldn’t be enough to say Yuri’s parents wanted rid of her, though overall they do, just as it would be too simple to say that Nobuyo and Osamu only wish to exploit Hatsue, though exploitation is involved. Through a mixture of motivational ambivalence and elliptical telling, Koreeda creates complexity of character. We know that Nobuyo and Osumo need to survive and Hatsue’s home and pension help, but they also care about this woman. This is partly because of the perception we have of their relationship long before we know the truth of it. They act with Hatsue as if they are part of her family and this isn’t a ruse (they needn’t act since nobody is watching): this is what they feel. As for offscreen space, or more precisely events to which the viewer isn’t privy, near the end of the film with Yuri back home. She watches her mother applying make-up. Her mother also has a healing scab on her face that Yuri touches and her mother tells her not to do that; she doesn’t like to be touched and Yuri shrinks away. We don’t know why the mark is there, but we can assume it has been administered by Yuri’s father. Perhaps her mother wasn’t just rejecting Yuri by allowing her to go missing, without reporting her absence, but protecting her from the sort of violence she herself is a victim of. The mother isn’t presented sympathetically in these moments (even when she tries to ingratiate herself with the hurt Yuri by saying she will buy her some clothes) but what might have seemed like an act of cruelty (abandoning her child) could be read as an act of consideration. One needn’t make too much of this speculative aspect; it is more whether a film invites it, creating characters that through a combination of events to which we don’t have access, and the complexity of a person’s motivations, they become three-dimensional.  

         Some may see that Koreeda isn’t offering three-dimensionality but messy characterisation. When he admits “…we started shooting in the summer, the truth is the script wasn’t really finished. I hadn’t really had a complete script by that point and we shot it anyways because we thought we might need it” (The Moveable Fest), this could add to the claim. But this would be to misconstrue the difference between confusion and ambiguity — that an unfinished script usually lacks something; Koreeda’s problem (which needn’t be seen as one) is one of profusion. It has a surfeit of something. A script with holes in it is a typical example of the former. Ken Miyamoto reckons there are five types of plot holes: the MacGuffin: “Inconsistencies regarding the plot device of MacGuffins, which are desired goals, objects, or any motivators that protagonists seek out for whatever reason.” There are too, logic plot holes: “when story points are not logical either in the context of the real world or the rules that the screenwriters and filmmakers set up.” We also have character plot holes: “Inconsistent character choices, random abilities presented out of the blue to solve a conflict, etc.” This is similar to narrative plot holes: “Gaps or inconsistencies in the storyline.” Finally, there are Deus Ex Machina plot holes: “Where a seemingly unsolvable or unsurvivable conflict is solved by the intervention of some new character, ability, or object.” (The Script Lab) Some look like they share characteristics with others: the Deux Ex Machina of someone having an ability we only hear about when they have a problem to solve can seem like a character plot hole, with a sudden ability out of nowhere to resolve a conflict. But what is clear in most of these instances, is that another script draft would help: for example introducing earlier in the film a couple of references to a skill that can then come into play during the conclusion. Usually, a MacGuffin is fine and Hitchcock loved them: Britton Perelman notes that in The 39 Steps, “the protagonist gets entangled in a plot that revolves around very important military secrets. What exactly those secrets are is far less important than their role in getting the protagonist involved in the espionage drama.” Or as Hitchcock put it: “the things the spies are after.” (The Script Lab) Plot holes are usually questions of narrative drive over narrative texture, and can be resolved with further re-writes. However, the narrative texture Koreeda seeks does not work off script logic because the emphasis isn’t on the mutually incompatible but the mutually possible. This doesn’t mean script work can’t help, though it might not be vital in the same way. 

        We can take, once again, Parasite as our point of comparison. We know exactly why the Kims finagle their way into the Parks’ house and the film demonstrates the skill in which they do so. Getting rid of the housekeeper by playing on her peach allergy; removing the chauffeur by giving the impression he has been using the family car for sexual encounters. We know why the Kims do it and exactly how they do it. The film needs plausibly to present the motive and the deed. In Shopkeepers, motive and deed are far more anfractuous as Nobuyo and Osumo don’t simply move in and take advantage of the grandmother, the parents aren’t just trying to offload Yuri onto others, and Osumo isn’t just interested in Shota as a useful addition to his work as a thief. And this isn’t because the characters change; it is because their feelings and circumstances are complex. Koreeda doesn’t quite tell us what they were like before the start of the story and, in the last thirty minutes, unravels aspects of that past without creating in the viewer certitude over it. When the detectives interview Aki, Shota and Yuri it isn’t especially to tell them the truth (and thus the viewer) but to get the information they need. When they tell Aki that Hatsue was receiving money from her parents in return for keeping her under Hatsue’s roof, this is a useful claim the police offer all the better to get Aki to tell them where Hatsue is buried. But it seems countered by an earlier scene where it is true Hatsue received money from Aki’s parents, though this wasn’t because she was pocketing cash in return for looking after Aki. Her parents didn't seem to know where she was, and Hatsui was receiving money because her father’s mistress’s son — and Aki’s father — felt guilty about his mother stealing Hatsou’s husband from her. When the officers speak to Aki about Nobuyo and Osumo, they tell her that they stabbed, buried and killed Nobuyo’s husband, but what they don’t tell her is that this was an act of self-defence as readily as a crime of passion. The police want information over the truth, and the viewer is left working with contrary perspectives rather than absolute knowledge. The film proposes that Hatsou, Nobuyo and Osumo act out of a mixture of self-interest and emotional need, evident when we find out that Nobuyo is unable to have children of her own. 

     It isn’t so much that characters change which creates three-dimensionality but that they possess mixed motives — far more common in life than radical transformations in character. What Koreeda offers in Shoplifting is a mixture of clear throughlines and fuzzy edges. Sure, we know by the end this isn’t a large family which has semi-adopted Yuri, but a makeshift one made up of a mixture of needs and pragmatic self-interest. Parasite is almost exclusively a work of pragmatic self-interest and has no need for those fuzzy edges and, consequently, most of the questions we are inclined to ask about it are over logical plot points. In contrast, Koreeda is constantly looking for this fuzziness. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong but I don’t actually sit down and write all the details about each character, their whole history. If you were to attend a screenwriting course, often they’d tell you to sit down and define each character before writing the script.” He adds, “I don’t believe in that, I don't think character development is the way to go. For me it’s the relationships. The relationship between one person and the person standing in front of them. It’s the way they move, the way they react, and how they relate to each other.” (The Film Experience)

        The film proposes character isn’t simultaneously coherent and malleable but inconstant and durable. Often when a film offers a twist it does so to show that a character isn’t who we thought they were — the femme fatale in Body Heat, the socialite in Jagged Edge, Emily in Side Effects and both main characters in Gone Girl. In Shoplifters, it is more that the situation isn’t what we thought it was, and this allows the film to retain what is an important aspect of almost of Koreeda’s work: a feeling for the individual without emphasising individuality, which in turn becomes almost a political position: “…a lot of crimes happen in Japan, but people tend to view crime as a matter of individual responsibility. They see it as this or that person’s fault, rather than something born[e] out of society and social ills. So they just punish that person – because it’s that person’s fault, his individual responsibility – they treat it as nothing more than that. That’s how they solve the problem in Japan.” (BFI) It is also how films often solve their problems. In Jagged Edge, for example, the socialite is or isn’t guilty, individually responsible or not culpable at all, and this is typical of most crime thrillers that play on plot twists and character transformations. But Shoplifters proposes that the adult characters are both innocent and guilty, depending on the given act and the given angle. From a newspaper perspective, this would be a story about a murderous couple kidnapping other people’s children and burying an old woman — who herself only took in an indirect relative so that she could make a bit of extra money. But while the couple are murderous and do bury the grandmother, just as the grandmother does take cash from Aki’s parents, this is only half the story, with Koreeda’s film proposing that the advantage of narrative texture over narrative drive is that you can tell a whole story without the viewer paradoxically knowing for sure the details of every event. We will never know whether Nobuyo and Osumo killed her husband out of calculation or desperation, and never know if Hatsou’s husband left her because (like Nobuyo) she couldn’t have kids. It is what happens when a film offers the complexity of character in the context of the texture of narrative.

     In reviewing the film negatively, Garcia may believe Koreeda is making an action-oriented and plotted film but we are more inclined to see one of introspection and experience. Garcia also adds Koreeda "excels at creating depth and reflection, so his abilities are restricted with the content and form in Shoplifters." (Siblin) But we might agree with him about the framing, even if for different reasons. Garcia views it as a problem of beauty and poetry. However, if we were to criticise the film it wouldn’t be that it lacks beauty or poetry, though it may, more that the film’s form doesn’t quite match the density of its content. The mise en scene is often contained by characterisational specifics rather than open to manifold perceptions and here we can think of Gilles Deleuze’s the saturated frame and David Bordwell’s idea of scenic density. These aren’t quite the same thing, but they can both be usefully adopted to comprehend the potential visual limitations of Koreeda’s film. Deleuze speaks of a saturated frame that is physical-dynamic, in contrast to emptier shots that play on the geometry of the frame over the fullness of information. In this dynamic frame it can reach the "...point where a secondary scene appears in the foreground while the main one happens in the background (Wyler), or where you can no longer even distinguish between the principal and the secondary (Altman)." (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image)

       It might be one of the potentially major differences between Shoplifters and Parasite, with Koreeda’s film keeping the frame busy, while Bong Joon-Ho often allows it to be rarefied. One isn’t better than the other, but if the film moves towards that saturation within a story full of the ambiguities of narrative texture over narrative drive, it can benefit from pushing this narrative density into the visually hectic and rich. This type of saturation is there as Deleuze notes in William Wyler and more so in Robert Altman, and we recently see it evident in some of the films by New Romanian directors, Cristian Mungui, and Cristi Puiu. Whether it is Altman’s M*A*S*H, or Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, Puiu’s Sierrenavada, or Mungiu’s RMN, these are works that insist the complexities they offer narratively will be matched by an equally complicated mise en scene. In Sierranavada, a family gather to commemorate the central character’s late father reduces him to just one of the characters within often densely packed frames in the family home. Characters are constantly entering and exiting the shot and sometimes Puiu follows one character only for the film to appear visually stranded, as though it isn’t quite where the action happens to be. A character wanders into one room and the character closes the door and the film leaves us outside the door in a suddenly empty hallway, before another character enters the frame and goes into the room. The camera hovers in the hall looking on, possessing a little bit of access because the character has offered the camera the opportunity by opening the door. 

     The film captures very well, formally, the intricacies of this family and its various tensions. Sierenevada (released a couple of years before Shoplifters), gives form to the limited information we have and makes it hard initially for us to try and comprehend who is who and the various details of their personalities. The film offers a constant sense of bewilderment, while Koreeda keeps his framing tight and simple, rarely making us search the frame informationally, no matter its saturation. When for example Koreeda shows us Shota in the background of a shot, stuck away in his cubbyhole in search of a bit of space and privacy, the film then cuts to a medium close-up of him reading. Though the frame is potentially one of saturated complexity, Koreeda often cuts or frames so that saturation is minimised.

       Scenic density is much more pragmatic than the saturated frame, and Deleuze writes about the latter to bring out the extremes: full and empty framing. (No matter the mention of Wyler - who might seem closer to scenic density over the saturated farme.) Bordwell wants to point out the careful craftsmanship of numerous filmmakers who like to use vivid, controlled mise en scene. “By scenic density I mean an approach to staging, shooting, and cutting in which selected details or areas change their status in the course of the action. I don’t count the bustle of background business, all that street traffic that is so much pictorial excelsior in our movies.” Bordwell insists the “shot keeps several items of dramatic significance salient in the composition.” (Observations On Film Art). This needn’t have the viewer scanning the frame for information; the film makes clear what we need to see but sometimes contains more than one important detail at a time (as opposed to editing, which would cut to each item of significance). Kurosawa’s High and Low is a good example,  with  Koreeda’s fellow, earlier compatriot creating a frame full and empty enough to allow the viewer to focus on different planes of meaning. After a boy is kidnapped, Kurosawa uses the widescreen frame and the large apartment the characters are in, to bring out without constant cutting the various characters’ positions on what should be done. 

     Koreeda’s film offers neither the saturation of Puiu nor the scenic density of Kurosawa, so while we wouldn’t agree with Garcia that it is a problem that Shoplifters lacks the visual poetry of Maborosi, for example,  we do feel that he hasn’t matched visual texture to narrative texture. When Osamu, Shota and Yuri steal a couple of fishing rods this could have been an example of scenic density, with Osamu in the foreground of the shot, discussing fishing materials with the shop worker, Shota in the middle ground stealing the rods and in the background Yuri yanking out the plug so that the alarm won't go off when he passes through the sliding doors. Instead, the film offers a series of cuts. When Trevor Johnston accurately notes that this “is much more layered”  (Sight and Sound) than some other Koreeda films of the last decade, it would have been an astonishing one if this layering had been incorporated much more into the mise en scene. This can seem like a quibble and perhaps in some ways it is. But at the same time, Koreeda’s film is so good that we might have wished it were better still, a work matching the texture of its narrative to an equally textured relationship to events within the frame.  

    


© Tony McKibbin