Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of the most accomplished of contemporary Japanese filmmakers, his work reliably well-regarded and garlanded at Cannes. His latest, Shoplifters (2018), is no exception, having won the Palme D’Or there. The film focuses on a large, extended family eking out a living in Tokyo by pooling their skills and resources: pensions, day-labouring in construction, pilfering from work in a laundry, sex work, and most of all, petty theft. The family’s exact relationship to each other remains ambiguous until the end of the film, when an accident of sorts brings their highly unofficial adoption of an abused child from the local neighbourhood to the attention of the authorities, and forces this ad hoc family unit apart.

Kore-eda’s work is often compared to the great Japanese realist Yasujirō Ozu, but the director himself has claimed a greater affinity with Ken Loach. Shoplifters, which Kore-eda has dubbed his ‘social movie’, makes that link obvious, through its rough humour, its improvised naturalism and its focus on a struggling working class. Along with this, Kore-eda brings his own distinctive focus on the structures of the family. Like Father, Like Son (2014) posed the question of who should raise two children who were swapped at birth and raised in different classes. Kore-eda proposes that the two sets of parents should raise the children together, in an extended family in which blood ties and bonds of love mingle and have equal weight. Lily Franky plays the working-class father in the earlier film, and in Shoplifters, he gives a turn of extraordinary charm and subtlety as a loveable rogue whose deepest desire is to have his adoptive son Shota call him Dad.

Shoplifters’ focus is on a family that is brought together by ties of solidarity rather than blood. To depict this, Kore-eda continually de-centres the characters, catching them in a complex web of choreographed reaction shots that manage to capture the rippling effects and shifting dynamics of collective interaction. The family’s intimate but cluttered and claustrophobic living space is contrasted with a few expansive high angle shots, one of which captures the whole family in the narrow strip at the front of their shared house, gazing up through a sliver of warm light between dark surrounding buildings to take in a firework display, showing them living literally in the cracks of a monolithic Japan Inc.

The backdrop of Shoplifters is the increasing precarity of life in contemporary Japan and the role of civic society and the family in picking up the pieces of a fraying social net. A country which once prided itself on being a ‘welfare superpower’, guaranteeing lifetime unemployment and generous pensions, is increasingly falling apart. Those who are in the system are only marginally better off than those who aren’t; for all the delicacy of its artistic culture and interpersonal sensitivity Japan remains one the most brutally exploitative capitalist countries on earth. Japanese famously has a word Karoshi that means simply death from working too much. As Peter Fleming’s recent The Worst is Yet To Come highlights, a poll showed 25 per cent of Japanese workers have fantasised about murdering their bosses.

While the film’s vision of the family is radical, its class politics are mild compared with Loach’s work. Too often it falls into a wistful arthouse liberalism, invested in the tragic but enviably rough-and-tumble lives of the poor — liberated from middle-class status anxiety and morality. For all its charm and skill, Shoplifters remains ‘social’, rather than socialist in any sense. This apoliticism is certainly not inherent to Japanese ‘consensus’ culture; one need only look at Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army (2007) to see this as a consequence of the defeat of the Japanese left. What makes Shoplifters, and Kore-eda’s work in general worthwhile are the tentative steps he takes toward seeing a transformed idea of the family as a protection from the ravages of capitalism. The question of whether this could foreshadow wider reforms remains both the utopian kernel of Shoplifters, and the extent of its political horizon. Perhaps the best we can ask for at this stage is that, in lieu of the workers, it’s the shoplifters of the world that unite.