“When you live in the city, minding your own business is practically a science.” – Morgan Freeman, Seven

Just last week, I read a news story about a baby in China who was found dead in his home after his parents snuck out for a few hours to play computer games at an Internet café. After reading the short article that reported the incident, my reaction was disbelief- how could these parents think it was a good idea to leave a small child alone for an extended period of time to amuse themselves with games? Then I told some other people about the news, we cracked some jokes about how stupid the parents were, and then we shrugged it off and went about our business. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows was inspired by another incident of child abandonment, and one of the film’s biggest strengths is how closely it observes the lives of its young protagonists, making their plight virtually impossible to dismiss with a few jokes.

What the two stories (the film and the recent news incident) have in common is that they illustrate a chief misfortune of parenting- that there are more people who are capable of reproducing than there are people who are good parenting material. I realize this may sound harsh to some, but not everyone with a fully-functional uterus has the emotional temperament to be an effective mother (the misfortune of women who can’t bear children yet could potentially be good mothers will have to wait for my as-now purely hypothetical review of Dariush Mehrjui’s searing 1996 film Leila). Keiko, the mother of the four children in Nobody Knows, falls into the category of unfit mothers. When she’s with the children, she clowns around and acts more like a sister than a role model and guardian. She is also prone to abandoning the children for long periods of time, leaving behind some money and placing the oldest of the four, Akira (played by Yagura Yuya) in charge.

Given the film’s story, there were several different directions Kore-eda could have taken, tone-wise. He could have taken a sensationalistic viewpoint, condemning deadbeat parents and extolling the heroism and scrappy resourcefulness of the children. He could have made the film a wallow by focusing on the squalor of the children’s living conditions. Instead of choosing one of these options, Kore-eda softens the melodramatic aspects of the story by focusing primarily on the way the situation is seen by the four youngsters in the apartment, especially Akira.

Take the film’s opening minutes, in which Keiko and Akira move into the apartment. This scene plays as gentle human comedy, as mother and son profess to the landlords that they will be living alone in the apartment, then proceed to unpack two smaller children- Shigeru and Yuki- from a pair of large suitcases (the fourth child, Kyoko, is collected from the train station after dark). Smiles and laughter dominate the beginning of the film, as the little ones react as young children are apt to do in such a situation, as if it’s all just a game. But though Keiko is smiling too as she plays with the kids, Akira seems less excited than the others. As the oldest, he’s had to pick up the slack for his mother, and this gives him wisdom and an air of resignation beyond his years.

Yagura Yuya won the best actor award at Cannes last year for his turn as Akira, and it’s his performance that provides an emotional anchor for the film. He has had to grow up quickly for the sake of his family, but deep down he’s still a child, and throughout the film he has to juggle adult concerns (buying food, preparing dinner) with the desires of a budding teenager (playing baseball, wanting to go to school, a crush on a girl). In the last scene before Keiko leaves the family pretty much for good, she tells him, “don’t I deserve to be happy?” Akira is a boy who knows the correct answer to this question (hint: it’s not “of course you do!”), although at certain points in the film he forgets this momentarily, as when he spends money on video games rather than saving to buy food.

Some critics have complained that Nobody Knows feels too long to be effective, but I believe that’s the point. By not paring the story down to 100 minutes, Kore-eda eliminates the need to rely too heavily on emotional punches. Instead, he allows the audience’s initial horror at the children’s plight to be overcome by a sense of tedium, reflecting the fact that, for the children, what was once a challenge (for the older kids) or an adventure (for the little ones) becomes a fact of everyday life. The relaxed pacing of the film also pays off when we realize the passage of time in the lives of the children, as we see the children get gradually bigger and hear Akira’s voice begin to deepen (at one point Kyoko asks him if he has a cold).

The film slips up a bit in the final reel, when Kore-eda, who had exercised restraint up to that point, underscores a key scene with an insipid-sounding Japanese pop song. Not only does the music detract from the tone the film had set up to that point, but the lyrics to the song are distractingly on-the-nose, hammering home the subject of the scene in a way that’s completely unnecessary (call it a Tao of Steve moment). But this scene comes late enough in the film that it doesn’t capsize what happened before, and far enough from the end that Kore-eda can finish the film strongly.

As in Kore-eda’s 1998 masterpiece After Life, much of the effectiveness of Nobody Knows lies in the small details of the characters’ lives. For example, I like the way the film introduces a helpful, slightly dim grocery clerk into the story, first with a background moment showing her struggling to open a plastic shopping bag, then with a scene where she quietly defends Akira against charges of shoplifting. I also like the little touches in the home lives of the children, such as Shigeru using rice to soak up the last of his noodle broth, or the juxtaposition of childlike innocence and impending doom that comes from a shot of a picture colored on a utility-shutoff notice.

Nobody Knows is a film that doesn’t provide easy solutions to its protagonists’ problems. Yes, Keiko is an unfit mother, but if their case was referred to social services the children would most likely be split up (“it happened before, and it was a real mess,” Akira relates at one point). The children’s fathers aren’t around much either, but Keiko has a habit of not telling her boyfriends about her kids, and some of the men are willing to chip in money whenever possible. And even on the rare occasion when all of the children do leave the apartment, nobody thinks twice about these unkempt-looking kids running around alone in what appears to be a pretty decent part of Tokyo. Nobody Knows, says the title, and nobody really makes an effort to know either. As long as apathy is a governing principle in urban life, stories like this will continue to happen.

Recommended:
Yes