Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda), 2004
Original Japanese Title: Dare mo shiranai
Nobody Knows is the most frustrating kind of filmgoing experience: halfway to being a wonderful film, it is unfortunately let down by a few critical flaws.
Based on real events, it follows the lives of four Japanese children who, as the film starts, are being smuggled into their new apartment by their flighty, irresponsible mother. The landlord thinks only one child is in the house, and the children have been raised to evade detection. The eldest son, twelve-year-old Akira (played by Yuya Yagira), is the most responsible in the household, cooking meals and caring for his siblings during his mother’s increasingly long absences. But one day she simply fails to come home, and the children must fend for themselves.
Writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda focuses on the small details of the children’s life, both before and after the abandonment: the games they play, the way they interact with each other, and the techniques they adopt to survive their abandonment. At this level the film is very successful. The performances of the children are remarkably natural, clearly based heavily on improvised moments that give the film a startling sense of reality. Yagira won Best Actor at Cannes in 2004 for his role, and is indeed astonishingly good, but the other young actors playing his siblings (Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, and Momoko Shimizu) are also extraordinary.
The two older children, who are more aware of the abnormality of their mother’s behaviour, are wounded and somewhat withdrawn. Yet the sensitive performances and direction let you see the thoughts and feelings that are buried under their defensive facades. When Akira talks to adults and reveals that his mother has gone away, you understand that he will never actually ask for adult intervention: but you also can see his longing for someone to do something tangible to help.
Such help is not readily forthcoming. The title Nobody Knows is an oblique expression of the critique of society implicit in the film: people do know, of course, or at least should know. Yet nobody does anything. Kore-eda, for the most part, prefers not to overstate this message, leaving it to emerge as an obvious conclusion from his tale. Instead, the film is an exercise in quiet realism, immersing us in the children’s world. Kore-eda has a talent for finding the beauty of superficially drab everyday places: the scenes of the children wandering the streets have a vivid sense of location.
All this means that there is a lot to like in Nobody Knows. Yet the film unfortunately dissipates much of its impact with excessive length. Kore-eda’s understated, almost documentary approach demands a measured pace so that scenes have a room to grow and develop. At 141 minutes, however, the film doesn’t just allow itself room for its virtues to show themselves: they get lost in its repetition and aimlessness. While some viewers will remain so entranced by the children’s story that they aren’t bothered (certainly the film’s generally favourable critical response suggests many have responded in this way), the film would have been much more powerful if it were thirty or even forty minutes shorter.
The film also missteps badly, I think, in its final half-hour. Kore-eda abandons the almost non-narrative approach of the central section of the movie for a resolution that feels heartless and, in its own way, somewhat formulaic. It seems like a conscious effort to be hard-hitting and to show us how serious the stakes have become, but it betrays the characters as we have come to know them. I don’t doubt that children in this situation could become so locked into their lonely existence that they wouldn’t seek help even as events spiralled out of control: I assume the resolution is based upon the real events. Yet the depiction of the children in the film is compassionate enough that you can’t accept that these particular children would act the way they do toward the film’s end. The children we have come to know are self-sufficient, guarded, and protective of each other, but they are not heartless automatons.
The film’s fragile mood is further disrupted by an inappropriate musical choice in the closing minutes, which again seemed an unnecessary imposition of manipulative technique. It’s a shame, because the film is full of moments that are beautiful and haunting, and these sequences deserved not to be cheapened by the film’s straining for effect in its later passages.
Originally published at In Film Australia.