Nobody Knows

Another graduate of the Cannes circuit, Nobody Knows is based on a real life event from the late Eighties where four children were abandoned by their mother and left to fend for themselves in their Tokyo apartment, with tragic consequences.

What I like about this film is its lightness of touch - it's a modern morality tale that resists melodrama, sentimentality and judgementalism almost entirely (the score too, generally eschews emotional manipulation), in lieu of an intimate portrait of the everyday existence of the four abandoned kids. The children all act very well, especially Yuya Yagira as 12-year old Akira, who impresses as the nominal head of the household, struggling to come to terms with his mother's neglect; forced to deal with an inner conflict between wanting a childhood for himself and assuming responsibility for his younger siblings. In the end, naivety engenders a slow descent into unpaid bills, squalor and malnutrition. When I say 'slow descent' though, it's painfully slow and that's really the film's Achilles' heel. It gives you time to really get to know the characters, but not much actually happens (until the bleak finale) - and with a running time of 2 hours 20 minutes, that means it frequently drags.

So despite being commendably realistic and refreshingly subtle in its execution, it's not a film I can imagine wanting to revisit any time soon.

誰も知らない
Dir. Koreeda Hirokazu, 2004