March 3- 9, 2005

movies

Left Behind

a room of One's own: Momoko Shimizu, Ayu Kitaura, Yuya Yagira and Hiei Kimura in Nobody Knows.

Abandoned children make their own rules in Nobody Knows.

by Sam Adams

It's probably only an accident of language that the stage name of the actress who plays the delinquent mother in Hirokazu Kore-eda's gently shattering Nobody Knows is transliterated as You. But the moment of discomfort that washes through the theater when the credit "The Mother: You" flashes on the screen is entirely in keeping with the movie's subtly accusatory tone. Kore-eda's fourth feature — after Maborosi, After Life, and a third, Distance, which was not released in the U.S. — is based on a real incident where four abandoned Japanese children lived on their own for months without any of their neighbors appearing to notice. When the story ended tragically, the public and the media were quick to blame the mother, but in Kore-eda's loose retelling, You's squeaky-voiced Keiko is a child herself, incapable of either shouldering responsibility or shirking it.

Keiko, who smuggles two of her children into the apartment in suitcases, has rules to prevent the children being discovered. Only 12-year-old Akira (Yuya Yagira) is allowed to interact with the outside world; the others must stay inside, avoid the balcony and the windows, and keep quiet. The reason for Keiko's charade is purposefully left vague, and in any case, it turns out to be unnecessary. After Keiko disappears, presumably for good, the rules begin to break down: Little Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) takes her first trip through the market, calling out the names of vegetables as she goes; Shigeru (Hiei Kimura) takes his toy robots onto the balcony whenever he chooses; Akira begins frequenting the outside world for pleasure as well as business. Still, no one notices. Even as the children's hair grows wild and their clothes fall to tatters, the adults around them avoid seeing the truth, or see only as much as they wish. The manager of the supermarket where Akira pays for his food with stacks of coins realizes something must be wrong, but acknowledges the situation only in the past tense. "So, your mother came back," he says idly, without evidence to support his comforting conclusion. Two of the children's fathers live nearby, but when Akira goes to see them, all they offer is whatever money they have in their pockets.

What's most intriguing about the title of Kore-eda's film is the extent to which it's inaccurate, or at least imprecise: People know, but they don't care, or they allow themselves to know only as much as precludes their having to take action. Surely the landlord who stumbles into the trash-choked apartment ought to know enough to call the welfare office, but she limits herself to demanding rent, swallowing the story that the excess children in the apartment are visiting cousins. Rather than blame the mother for setting the terms of their invisibility, or the children for obeying her, Kore-eda creates a microcosmic society that shuts its eyes to truths it cannot bear.

Abandoned, and not only by their mother, the children grow up fast, although without an adult to guide their progress, their maturation is digressive. In their mother's absence, they make their own rules: Utility bills are covered in crayon rather than paid, and the logic of time starts to dissipate. Without calendars or any kind of schedule, we can only surmise how long has passed. The coat of nail polish carelessly applied by her mother has chipped off Kyoko's nails: perhaps a week. Akira's hair has become a shaggy mane: months, but how many? Kore-eda's ultranaturalist style, comprised of mostly static shots, natural lighting and minimal variation in lens length, achieves a kind of hallucinatory realism where the texture of each moment overwhelms any sense of the passage of time. (The use of grainy Super 16 stock increases the tactile sensation.) Kore-eda and cinematographer Yutaka Yamasaki crop mundane events like the boiling of water so they seem strangely new, both unsettling and wondrous.

Even when it expands outside the apartment, the children's world remains limited. Kore-eda reuses locations that accrete meaning, charting the topography of the children's world. Each time they walk past the corner pay phone, we think of the fateful call when Akira learns his mother won't be coming home, while Yuki's second trip through the market occurs under far less joyful circumstances than the first.

Like The 400 Blows or Hope and Glory, films in whose exalted class it belongs, Nobody Knows captures the way in which children's momentary pragmatism allows them to capture simple truths that adult reasoning obscures. (Like Truffaut, Kore-eda ends on an ambiguous freeze-frame, unwilling either to predict the characters' future or relinquish their world.) Though Akira remains a child despite his elevated responsibility, awkwardly trying to make friends with boys he meets at the local arcade, his mother is right when she says he's starting to look like his father, or at least like an adult. His mother seems to shy away from the camera, but Akira faces it head-on. While conventional "children's movies" invest children with the power of fantasy, here it's adults who flee the truth, and children whose only option is to face it.

Nobody Knows Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda An IFC Films release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse recommended