Before going to this late-night party of one of my closest workmates in the publishing company, J, I watched Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018), an award-winning Japanese movie on a three-generational family who took care of an abused and neglected young girl despite living in poverty. They steal, they salvage trash, they keep their lives hidden (they have to, knowing the ways they acquire things). Was the girl adopted or kidnapped? Does a family with such understanding of what love is—the antidote to pain despite its coexistence with loss—deserve such social-class-related limitations as they fight for their existence? For the two-hour duration, I felt like a family member who, just like the six unusual tenants of a tiny house cluttered with filthy everyday things, tries to acquire things with the acknowledgment that this has to be done with much hiding.
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Why watch a heavy movie before attending a birthday party in a restobar? you might ask.
It was raining in Mandaue—just a light drizzle, the clouds seem to say out of remaining kindness over humans behind climate change—and I missed watching as many films as I used to. I just thought of awarding myself with a movie after all those sleepless nights of reading literary theories and writing the first chapter of my graduate school thesis.
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No twists in the story, just straight-up emotional build-up. And that ending’s so unforgettable. (Okay, enough, Andrea. Don’t spoil this punch-in-the-gut part.) But there’s this scene in Shoplifters that stuck to my mind:
Always do I tell my few constants that it’s not having the same feathers that draws this affinity in me for them, but the shared scars—not in sameness, but in familiarity.
What a movie. On the bond. On the concept of home. On love as a choice. On love made stronger by choice.
Andeng 