Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Shoplifters
2018 · Hirokazu Kore-eda · Shoplifters on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the hand signals Shota and Osamu use in the store. (performance)
The first scene is a shoplifting run played as choreography. A flick, a tap on the air, a packet gone. Kore-eda holds the camera calm and declines to editorialize with angle or cutting.
Payoff: Before you learn one fact about these people, their bodies tell you they have done this together for years. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a practiced posture that shows a social bond without anyone stating it.
Look at how the six of them fit around each other indoors. (staging)
Every surface of the house is covered with clothes, containers, stacked food. Figures crowd doorways, take corners, sit pressed together, and step around objects with the ease of long cohabitation.
Payoff: The clutter reads two ways at once. It is what poverty looks like and it is the record of everything this household has managed to keep.
Count the close-ups. Kore-eda gives you very few. (camera)
Ryuto Kondo mostly holds at medium or medium-long distance, present but never pressing. The light is natural.
Payoff: A camera that witnesses rather than interrogates puts you in the position the state never takes with these people, which is simply paying attention.
Listen to the cooking, the city hum, the lack of music. (sound)
Haruomi Hosono's score is sparse synthesizer texture that suspends time instead of naming an emotion. Most of what you hear is the material world of the house: pans, cupboards, traffic beyond the wall.
Payoff: The soundtrack refuses to instruct you. Feeling has to form on its own, which is why it arrives without warning.
Notice how long a scene runs after its point is made. (cutting)
Kore-eda edits his own films and shoots far more than he uses, a documentary habit. Scenes develop without hurry and often resolve nothing. They gather weight only against each other.
Payoff: The patience is how the film gets you living inside this household rather than watching it from outside.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how they move around each other in the house. That practiced ease is the film's case for what a family is.