Review
NOBODY KNOWS
Starring Yuya Yagira, Ayu Kitaura and Kimura Hiei
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Opens Friday
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Childhood, as witnessed through an adult lens, is all too frequently idealized as a state of either unblemished innocence or sage-like precocity.
Nobody Knows, the latest film from Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu, understands that childhood is a great deal more complex than that limited range of expression allows us to believe. The film concerns a family of four children left to fend for themselves in a low-income Tokyo suburb over the course of about one year. Their experiences, which run the gamut from joyous liberation to horrific despair, reveal as much about the minutiae of childhood as they do about systemic problems in contemporary Japanese society.
Not to say that Nobody Knows is an "issue" film – it’s much too sensitive and humane for that. Instead we witness the action largely from a child’s point of view, revelling in the chaos of the situation even as we later panic when it becomes evident that order, as we once imagined it, will never be restored. It’s the clearest metaphor for growing up that the film presents, and in demanding that we actively internalize this experience rather than just passively watching it, Nobody Knows reaches towards a whole other level of sympathetic resonance.
One could talk about Hirokazu’s poetic realism, or the distinctly natural performances of all four child actors. One might find it significant, for example, that the film was shot chronologically over the course of a year. Or one might note similarities to the family dramas of Ozu Yasujiro, while acknowledging that there’s nothing in the late master’s canon to rival the poignant melancholy found here.
Personally, though, I was spent at the end of this film, both emotionally and lacrimally, and all such palaver merely detracts from the fact that Nobody Knows asks us to ponder much more troubling questions about our own abilities to accept responsibility for our actions. As the barely pubescent eldest son Akira (Yûya Yagira) bucks against the mantle of responsibility that has been thrust upon him at too young an age, it becomes evident that the line between child and adult is never easily crossed. Even less so when you’re only just a kid. |
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