Pretty much all of the Japanese films we’ve watched recently has been by Hirokazu Kore-eda and no wonder all of his recent output have been at least decent. After The Third Murder which experimented with a different type of genre, this one can be seen as a return to form featuring all of the director’s favorite themes and types of characters. Yet it’s different enough from his other works to feel fresh and to hit you hard with its emotions.

An unusual ad hoc family lives in a small house together on the fringes of society in Tokyo. The father Osamu works odd jobs in construction but also regularly shoplifts with the son Shota. The wife works in a laundry. Also living with them is an elderly woman they call grandmother on whose pension they all rely on to make ends meet and a younger woman who works in a hostess bar. One evening Osamu and Shota encounter a little girl who appears to be freezing and starving. They bring her home for a meal and after discovering signs of abuse on her body, accept her as a new member of the family and name her Lin. Later they see on the news that the police are searching and change her appearance so as to hide her. The family seems happy for a while and even enjoy a day at the beach. But we all know that the situation cannot last and Shota starts feeling guilty about teaching Lin how to steal.

Once again Kore-eda returns to the subject of flawed parents who fail their children but here he expands it to say that the family you choose for yourself is better than the family you are born to. The director isn’t exactly subtle about this as the grandmother figure explicitly puts this in words but the message is still a powerful one. The story is carefully built so as not to immediately tell the audience how these people living together are connected with one another. Part of the draw of the film is having to work it out it for ourselves. I do like that even as it shows Osamu and his wife Nobuyo being caring to Shota and Lin, they’re still far from perfect parents. Shota for example never gets to go to school and is erroneously taught that only children whose parents don’t teach them at home have to go to school. The adults also impart dubious moral values, saying that it’s okay to steal things from shops as no one owns them yet. Yet it’s clear that this is already the best that life can offer to them and they are happy.

One thing I’m not certain of is why they need to steal at all. Between the grandmother’s pension and the work the adults do, even if it’s irregular, they should have enough to live on. They must surely realize that it’s only a matter of time until one of them gets caught and that they’re not offering the children any kind of a long term future. If they are truly happy and want to stay together, surely they ought to try harder to abide by the law. As Kore-eda wrote this script himself, it seems to me that this is a kind of twist added to make the story more attractive and as such feels like a case of the creator showing his hand too much.

All told, this is a fine film and once again I applaud this director for showing ordinary life in the margins of Japanese society. His strong sense of how best to portray moments of familial intimacy is especially compelling, from a stolen moment of lovemaking Osamu and Nobuya manage to share, the grandmother contentedly looking upon her adopted family at the beach, or their excitement at seeing a fireworks display and the camera that shows us their faces rather than the fireworks. I look forward to more of his work.