" Shoplifters " stills
Changjiang Daily News (Reporter Qiu Chen) Starting from August 3, Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu 's new film "Shoplifters" will be released in theaters nationwide. The film was screened at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It won the highest award " Palme d'Or " at the Festival. A reporter from Changjiang Daily watched the movie and found that this work maintains Kore-eda Hirokazu's iconic "moisturizing and silent" image tone, uses the simplest materials to tell the most complex stories, and uses the plainest emotions to create a flesh-and-blood family. Six mouths touched the hearts of moviegoers.
Kore-eda Hirokazu's works have a simple style and focus on introspection. His previous works such as "Like Father, Like Son" and " Kaijie Diary" have won awards at international film festivals such as Cannes and Venice. "Shoplifters" released this time is also the "upstart" that won the "Palme d'Or" at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The entire film focuses on a special family of six who have no blood relationship. It tells the story of each member's efforts to find warmth in this deformed family that makes a living by stealing.
In the film, the father who is an "old man" does not work hard and breaks his leg, so he goes around stealing with his picked-up son; the mother who is a laundry worker once had a gray past, but she treats the daughter who suddenly breaks into her life better than any other mother. Both have more motherly love; the grandmother who is facing death and the sister who makes a living by selling sex are dependent on each other, but the old man hides it from the latter and often goes to her native family to ask for pension funds... It can be said that the father and son that the director focuses on in the film, The three-layered relationship between mother and little girl, grandmother and sister, with its calm narrative, ruthlessly exposes the cruelest side of life.
However, these six people who have no blood relationship at all, although they have secrets behind their backs, and although they have all experienced the torture of cruel life, they have never given up looking for the warmth in life. There is a scene in the movie that depicts a family who is so embarrassed that they even need to steal shampoo, and go to the beach for an outing together. When grandma looked at the five people holding hands and playing together on the beach, she silently said the line "Thank you." At that moment, this fragile family suddenly burst out with a warmth that was warmer than any ordinary family.
Especially at the end of the movie, Sakura Ando, who plays the mother, is being questioned at the police station. With tears welling up in her eyes, she asked a question: "Does one automatically become a mother after giving birth to a child?" It was subtle, restrained and touching, hitting the tear point and making many viewers shed tears. And this sentence also allows the audience to better understand what director Hirokazu Kore-eda said: "I think families must have shortcomings."
