^TM

Nobody Knows

Film review by Madelyn Miller

When I visited Japan ten years ago, I had a chance to do a family home visit with an upper-class family. Three generations lived in a space that seemed small to me, but they clearly were happy and close. Their lives seemed richly interwoven and complete. I remember bringing them a big jar of jellybeans and watching the children’s delight, but also noticing them offering one to the grandmother before they ate any.

But did I really observe the relationships in this family? How much do we really know about the way anyone lives?

The movie Nobody Knows begins with the mother and older son introducing themselves to their new landlord, vaguely referring to an absent father. How could the neighbors know the mother who politely offered a gift to the landlord was soon to leave them all behind.

The acting throughout is fabulous, and it is was even more amazing that it was the first movie role for most of the casts.

At times the film is slow and drawn out, but that only seems to echo the wait the children have for their mother, who pops in once or twice, and then seems to disappear, leaving them to recreate their own family.

Synopsis:
Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers. They have never been to school. The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note asking her 12-year-old boy to look after his younger siblings. And so begins the children’s odyssey, a journey nobody knows.

Despite their mother's abandonment, the four children do their best to survive in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules. But when they have no choice but to engage with the world outside the apartment, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses.

Kore-eda incorporated documentary techniques to make this film extraordinarily intimate and unaffected. Filmed chronologically over a year, "Nobody Knows" captures the young amateur actors growing as their characters do, highlighting the details of the children’s lives, whether the nuances of a manicure, a toy piano, squeaking sandals, a cup of instant noodles, or a box of chocolates, to evoke not only the distinctive world of these particular abandoned children, but the gentleness and beauty of every childhood.

This affair happened sixteen years ago, in 1988. Born of different fathers, these children never went to school and didn't legally exist because their births were never declared. Abandoned by their mother, they lived on their own for six months. The death of the youngest girl put a tragic end to this adventure. Curiously, none of the other inhabitants of their apartment building were aware of the existence of three of the children. This headline brought up various questions to my mind. The life of these children couldn't have been only negative. There must have been a richness other than the material, based on those moments of understanding, joy, sadness and hope. So I didn't want to show the "hell" as seen from the outside, but the "richness" of their life as seen from inside.

I had a lot of trouble getting this project off the ground. Fifteen years passed after I wrote the first draft of the screenplay. Would this affair still be an actuality fifteen years later? Before making the film, I had to ask myself that question. According to statistics from Japan's Minister of Education, the number of homeless children between the ages of seven and fourteen dropped from 533 in the year 1987 to 302 in the 2000. But these statistics only refer to children whose births have been declared. If we take into consideration that the birth rate has dropped, we could suppose that today there are more children who are living illegally the way Akira and his brothers and sisters did. I estimate this headline was not an isolated case in Tokyo. It is more of a social problem that concerns us all. The protagonist of the film doesn't just represent the young boy in the 1988 headlines. He is one child among thousands today, which we are not even aware of.

Children Growing Up On Their Own

This movie reminded me of Born Into Brothels, http://www.travellady.com/Issues/February05/1249BornIntoBrothels.htm
where we also see children who seem to grow themselves up

Genre:  Art/Foreign and Drama
Running Time:  141 minutes
Rating:  PG-13
Japanese with English Subtitles

Cast:  Yagira Yuya, Kitaura Ayu, Kimura Hiei, Shimizu Momoko, Kan Hanae, Yuya Yagira, and Momoko Shimizu    

Director/Producer/Screenwriter:  Hirokazu Kore-eda
Cinematographer:  Yamazaki Yutaka

Back to TravelLady Magazine