Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows: Watching the Children - Page 3

That applies to the incidents in the movie as well. I rarely had the feeling that I was seeing what would happen to an actual family of children abandoned in this way. For starters, they don't fight among themselves, which I suppose you might explain by saying that their situation has made them precociously aware of their interdependence and so they wouldn't risk fighting, but that isn't made clear if it was Kore-eda's intention. (Think of the more bustlingly believable scenes in the divorce drama Shoot the Moon in which the oldest daughter makes breakfast for her sisters before school and then gets mad and dumps it when they don't appreciate her effort.) Kore-eda's kids don't even get sick and, until the very end, they don't have accidents. Neither do they suffer in any way we could fail to sympathize with. They don't have the vices of children as I remember them from my own childhood--they're not selfish, whiney, aggressive. They're purely victims of their mother.

It's no more plausible that the people who become aware of what's going on don't intervene. In one scene the landlady stops in to ask about the unpaid rent and sees that Keiko lied about how many children she had when she moved in. Kyoko tells her Keiko is working in Osaka (249 miles away), which you'd think would be a bad answer, but as far as we know the landlady never comes back. To put it as simply as possible, there's more drama in any child's life, both internally and externally, than there is in the lives of the kids in Nobody Knows.

In the IndieWire interview, Kore-eda says he aimed to show "children's incredible stamina and lust for life and vulnerability and complexity," but most of his darts land on number 3. The kids' lives are exposed to our gaze but what is revealed are four unstained souls, Rousseauian exemplars of childhood innocence. The narrative problem is that naturalism isn't the best way to express ideals. (Isn't the point of "candid" camerawork to capture the unideal behavior people engage in when they don't know they're being watched?)

Oliver Twist is also a pure soul lost in the bad big city; Nobody Knows is what Oliver Twist would be like if he ended up fending for himself in a London garret alone, and without drawing the attention of Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies or of Monks, the Artful Dodger, Fagin, and Bill Sikes, either. There's a young cashier at a grocery store who feels for Akira, as Nancy felt for Oliver, but there are no major adversaries to protect him against. It doesn't make sense for Kore-eda to present the children as allegorically pure if he's not shaping the narrative as a romance in which the allegory can function. Pure souls have to be hindered, diverted, tempted, and then must struggle against and ultimately overcome the forces of evil, in order for their purity to have narrative impact.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog