On the moral seriousness of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters (2018) and what it says about kinship.

Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and then sparked a significant political controversy in Japan, where the film's treatment of a found family living on petty theft and welfare was read by some commentators as an attack on family values. The controversy says more about the commentators than about the film.

Kore-eda is interested in a specific question: what makes a family? His answer in Shoplifters — that shared tenderness and chosen obligation can constitute family regardless of biological relation — is not offered as polemic. It's offered as the observation of specific human beings in specific circumstances.

The film's final act, which reveals the legal reality behind the family's situation, does something that lesser films would use to moralize. Kore-eda refuses the moralism. The revelations are presented with the same evenness that characterizes the rest of the film: here is what happened, here is what it means to the people involved, here is the question that remains.

The last image of the film is one of the most emotionally precise images I know of in contemporary cinema.