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 | Nobody Knows Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda Rating: M Palace Nova Cinemas, now showing  In Japan's greatest movie 'The Seven Samurai', director Akira Kurosawa laments the passing of the Samurai era, hierarchical respect and the emergence of the capitalist village. In 'Nobody Knows', director Hirokazu Kore-eda extends Kurosawa's nightmare even further. The capitalist village has become the sprawling, atomising metropolis of Tokyo. The villagers have traded community for narcissism, abandoning their most precious gift - their children.Keiko (Japanese television star You) moves into a small apartment with her son Akira (Yuya Yagira). As landlords won't rent to families with more than one child, Keiko smuggles in her three other children - Kyuko (Aya Kitaura), the excitable Shigeru (Hai Kimura) and the delightful poppet Yuki (Momoko Shimuzu) - inside suitcases. Like Anne Frank, the three young children are forced to hide inside the flat to avoid eviction: the Nazis have been replaced by landlords. We also learn that Akira and Kyuko have never been to school. When Keiko leaves the children for a break, they suddenly have to fend for themselves. Initially, Akira manages well and the bond between the siblings is strong. However, following Keiko's return and immediate departure, the children's loneliness turns to despair when Christmas comes without their mother's return. Eventually, the children venture out of the apartment with Akira, but their inevitable steady decline ends in disaster. The children's performances are all charming, but Yagira (winner of the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival) towers over the film, convincingly moving between determination and desperation while conveying the sense that his own childhood is ebbing. The narrative is slow and gentle, but never less than compelling. It's poignant and painful to watch the children's lives unravel. In a movie based on actual events, Kore-eda leaves no doubt about who is responsible for the children's predicament. While Keiko is vain and shallow, Kore-eda's anger is directed squarely at Tokyo and its citizens. In her recent love letter to Tokyo 'Lost In Translation', Sophia Coppola celebrates the city and its quirky pachinko parlors, vending machines, karaoke machines and its endless fascination with technology. However, in 'Nobody Knows' the same iconography is soulless and complicit. The children wander invisibly through a maze of empty staircases, traffic lights, train stations and monorails. Kore-eda's use of light is effective. The interiors are half-lit to signify the children's half-lives. Symbolism is evident in the use of the colour red: Kyuko's fading nail polish mirrors her fading aspirations, and Yuki leaves the apartment in the red suitcase in which she arrived. The ending is devastating. Kore-eda offers neither hope nor redemption for the big city: there is only self-help and the ever-problematic future. Suffer the little children.  | |
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