Shoplifters: tears to our eyes

Shoplifters don’t reveal, in the English title, who these criminals are. In the original title in Japanese, it is explicit that the members of the "family" Shibata are contumacious store thieves.

However, it is not only this activity that unites them. The family has strong ties except those of blood, for it is the shortage that makes this cluster of people stand and act like an actual family.

The matriarch Hatsue, the Grandma, lives on a small alimony received from her ex-husband since the divorce. Today dead, her husband continues to receive posthumous honors. In the house, tiny, still live the Daddy and the Mother, Osamu and Nobuyo, that we will discover later to have united in a striking and traumatic episode. He is a hod carrier and she works in a laundry room, picking up, here and there, little forgotten trinkets in the pockets of the clothes. There are two more inhabitants in the house: a 10-year-old boy (who sleeps in a closet) and a young Aki, the granddaughter of Hatsue's ex-husband, who works as hostess in a club, where she shows off for costumers.

In the opening scene, Osamu and the boy Shota return home after a choreographed swipe at a market (though they have forgotten the shampoo), when they encounter a 5-year-old girl left on the balcony of her house, probably by her violent and negligentparents. Fearing that the little girl Yuri dies of cold, they take her with them to their home, where she is at first rejected, and later "adopted" by the family.

Although the girl later becomes wanted by the police, the Shibatas do not worry because, in their particular code of ethics, they understand that there is only kidnapping if there is a request for ransom. Likewise, they believe there is no theft if the goods have not yet been sold to clients unless the store that sells them is going bankrupt.

Hirokazu Kore-eda builds a minimalist and beautiful movie as if it were a large onion that we were gradually stripping until we discovered, among acid layers, a core that brings tears to our eyes.

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