NOBODY KNOWS
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring: Yagira Yuya, Shimizu Momok
Genre: Japanese Drama
Year: 2003
Reviewed by Vance Aandahl
Watson Scale Rating (0 being worst and 6 being perfect): 6
Here in the movie section of the vast and eclectic SilmanWorld Web Site, whenever Master Jeremy sweeps out the stalls of the stable where his herd of reviewers produce their work, what he finds in superabundance are reviews of Asian films featuring eviscerations, beheadings, the severing of limbs, skinnings, impalements, gang rapes, suicides, bullet riddlings, arrow bombardments, eyeball gougings, ghastly ghosts, descents into madness, and the like, movies in which a typical scene might show a serene and exquisitely beautiful young maiden crooning insanely as she turns her immobilized victim into a human pincushion, slowly and lovingly, one pin at a time. If it’s Asian films you want, Master Silman, it’s Asian films you’ll get, but this time I’m going against the grain and reviewing a movie that has no violence whatsoever and depicts nothing out of the ordinary, even though its characters are stuck in an extraordinary situation.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s quiet masterpiece of social realism, NOBODY KNOWS, is a fictional story that draws its inspiration from a true case. In 1988 four children lived by themselves in a Tokyo apartment after being smuggled into it by their mother. She gave them money to pay the rent and buy food, and then she abandoned them. To avoid detection, only the oldest child ventured out. The other three never left the apartment. Many months went by before anyone else in the building became aware of what was going on and realized that no adult was taking care of the children. This case was viewed as scandalous by the Japanese, who place a much higher value on parental and social responsibility than we Americans do.
To achieve a high level of realism, Kore-eda filmed NOBODY KNOWS over a period of eighteen months. We can see the children growing up. The youngest, an energetic little boy named Yuki (Momoku Shimuzu), appears to be about three and a half when he comes popping out of a suitcase in the opening scene, but by the end he looks about five. Yuki’s two sisters, Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura) and Shigeru (Hiei Kimura), also grow noticeably. The oldest of the four siblings, a boy named Akira (Yuya Yagira), has the responsibility of grocery shopping, keeping track of the money, and supervising the three younger children, and he’s the one whose growth is most striking. Yagira was still a child of 12 when filming began, but with the passage of eighteen months of real time and 141 minutes of movie time, his body took on a lean muscularity and his voice deepened. Thus we see that while Akira’s responsibilities are turning him into a man, so too is puberty.
Having his actors age visibly is effective, but there is a much more important reason why Kore-eda’s decision to spread the filming over a year and a half helped him to achieve an exceptional degree of realism in NOBODY KNOWS. My guess is that his four child actors hammed it up for the camera during the first few weeks, maybe even for the first few months, but eventually they settled down and just did whatever Kore-eda asked them to do – unselfconsciously and naturally, without a hint of affectation or artifice. This was made easier because nearly all the scenes show them engaging in mundane activities familiar to children – watching TV, playing with toys, washing the dishes, planting a seed in a can of dirt and putting it on the balcony. Also, nearly all the shots are done with natural lighting and a stationary camera, techniques that make it easier for actors of any age to forget they’re being filmed. All four kids are equally believable, but Yagira’s interpretation of Akira is the focal point of NOBODY KNOWS, and his performance is not only astonishingly free of false notes but also dramatically powerful. I’m not alone in admiring Yagira’s accomplishment. At the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, he won the prize for best actor.
Kore-eda’s technique is not totally naturalistic. He has two techniques that add an element of style. First, in most of his camera shots, he is simply content to reveal the messy plainness of the real world, but occasionally he startles us with a shot that’s exceptionally well composed, or one in which distant lights seem to suffuse the night sky with an otherworldly beauty. Second, like the Dogma filmmakers, he generally uses music only if it’s a natural part of the scene. But he does not eschew background music altogether. At key moments in NOBODY KNOWS, a simple, sweet melody recurs. The accumulative effect is wonderful. Each time we hear it, the melody conveys a greater measure of emotion.
Emotion. What matters most to Kore-eda is that we feel emotion, that we care about the children, that we feel an upsurge of sorrow and joy as we witness their determination, their ingenuity, and their vitality in an uncaring world, but he is in no hurry to make us feel it, and he refuses to use the cheap tricks that Hollywood directors bury us under whenever they make a tearjerker. Kore-eda’s pace is exceptionally slow, patient, and unhurried. He knows that for us to feel a genuine and meaningful swelling of emotion, we must first engage in a meticulous observation of the life the children create for themselves, and there’s no way we can do that if we’re being rushed along. NOBODY KNOWS is a long movie, but with each quiet little scene, our feelings for Akira, Kyoko, Shigeru, and Yuki grow stronger and deeper. The buildup of emotion gathers force. During the last ten minutes, tears streamed down my cheeks, and I had to struggle to keep from sobbing.
