Dare mo shiranai

There are very few films I have seen that had the power to affect me as deeply as Nobody Knows. As highly as I recommend it, I must also forewarn, that this film has power, some very serious power. To call Hirokazu Koreeda's Nobody Knows anything less than a masterpiece would be an insult to the story it tells. The craftsmanship we witness here, from the masterful direction to the outstanding performances that the children were able to commit to, are all something of incredible proportions.

Nobody Knows, which is a true story, tells of four siblings, ages 5-12, from different fathers, who live in a small apartment in Tokyo. At first, they live in the apartment with their childish Mother who is hardly ever home. With the exception of the oldest, Akira, the mother snuck the children in to keep the rent lower and prohibits them from ever leaving the apartment, even the veranda, for fear of them being seen. The children do not go to school. As they look after each other, all they do is patiently and affectionately wait for their mother to come home.

As the story progresses, the children wake up one morning to some money on the kitchen table with a note from their mother saying that she'll be home in a month. As Akira steps up and takes charge of the apartment, the bills, and his siblings, the children still hold hope that mother will be home soon. And then, Nobody Knows hits you like a truck and goes right through you. Complete Abandonment. The smiles diminish and the childish affection for a mother that will never return is gone. Gone to play mother to another family, it is now entirely up to Akira, with money running out.

Koreeda's direction of the children is exceptional, as if the film was shot entirely candid. The camera-work is sincere, as if we were one of the children stuck in that apartment. There are no gimmicks here, no slide of hand, or post-production miracles. Nobody Knows is raw, and thrives in Koreeda's ability to capture the distinct personalities of all four siblings, their hopes, and those secretive moments where Koreeda directs the children not for the stories sake, but for the sake of the children being children.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Nobody Knows is the performances of the four children. All four children, who conjured phenomenal performances, were played by Japanese youths with no film backgrounds. After you see the film, it is likely that Koreeda preferred it this way, tapping into the honesty and energy that such youth had to offer. Their performances are so sincere and beautiful that on several occasions the tears will start to fall, the goose bumps will rise, and your heart will undoubtedly cry out to rescue these children, to grab them in your arms and set them free.

Without giving too much away, one of the most touching scenes to me, is on Yuki's birthday, the only thing she wants is to be able to go outside for a walk with her big brother Akira. So when the night comes, she puts on her little bear slippers, an ear to ear smile on her face, and with her hand in her brothers hand, they set her heart free for if not only a night.

Nobody Knows is a film that I will never let go of. This film impacted me so much and I found it so absolutely remarkable, that it hasn't left my mind since it's viewing. I almost feel that recommending this film just isn't enough, and all I can say is that I hope everyone gets the chance to enjoy this film for all that it is worth. As sure as it is to invoke emotion, it is as sure to please as a piece of cinema.

"Children can not choose their parents" This was what came into my mind after I saw this movie.

This movie is based on actual incident happened in 1988. It was much more miserable than the movie. A woman was living with a man. She thought he had filed the marriage notification. When their son was born, the man said he had filed the birth notification. One day he left her to live with another woman. When the boy reached the primary school age, she knew neither the marriage notification nor the birth notification were filed. Facing this situation, she decided to hide her children from the society. (According to another source, the mother told the police that she thought the birth notification of a bastard child would not be accepted.)

She had met several men and had 5 children, two boys and three girls, who were not registered and hidden from other people. When the second boy died of sick, she hid the corps in the closet. While she works in a department store, the eldest son took care of three sisters. When the eldest son was 14, she went out to live with her new man, who was 16 years older than her. She gave the eldest son her address. When the children were protected by the police half a year later, a girl was dead, and the two were debilitated, as they were confined in a room and poorly fed. The girls were 3 and 2 y/o and still used diapers, but they were changed only once every day. It is reported that the eldest boy blamed himself for not being able to take good care of his sisters, instead of blaming his mother...

Compared to the real story, the movie is less miserable. In the movie, even the little boy and girl look normal and pretty, but in the real story they were very poorly developed. But it was still more than enough to surprise me. What a mother! In a conversation with the eldest boy, she says "May I not become happy?" She acts on this thought, without thinking of the same right about her children. Her childish lisping talk describes her immaturity. And of course, men were more guilty. Sadly, children can not choose their parents.

Every child acted amazingly well, very natural. Particularly, the eyes of the eldest boy, Akira, are very impressive. The eyes tell many things from their miserable life.

If your local art theater plays it, go watch it. Find it in DVD store if you can. Rent it through your local mega movie renting store if you have to. Everyone has to watch this movie.

As a highly urbanized country, Japan is subjected to constant social problem, more so than other developed country. Hence, often you will have your Japanese movies that reminds us these problems, Tokyo Godfather, Fireworks, etc.

Nobody Knows is one of them from another angle.

Its director likes to use close up on little details like finger nails, shoes, t-shirt collar to tell the audience what kind of situation it is for the victims in the movie. Often we neglect these little details; often we neglect the unfortunate people around us.

Once in a while we have a world disaster, we all jumped in, we all gave our helping hands, we all praised greatly how much help we gave on TV. Comparing and contrast the figures of aids given with other countries, even. Little things, little unfortunate things happened around us, everyday, everywhere, they are all nicely tucked under our lavish mat and those story never told, those needed aid never arrived. Because they have no news value or because helping a few people doesn't gain enough prestige?

Nobody knows, as the title suggest, We never aware of these problems, by our own choice or not. The movie has an unusual slow pace. There is no climax, everything just get worse. Just the those misfortune people nobody knows, their life are not full of excitement, everyday is another to get by, nothing to wish for, nothing to hope for. Nobody Knows depicts the days of these unsounded misfortune. You could have seen the unfortunate events to come. You would have wished they would not come. One by one they came.

The brilliant part, Nobody Knows lets its audiences decide the ending.

"Nobody Knows" is painful to watch. It's a story you won't shake off, depicting the most defenseless of humans -- four young children, the oldest only twelve -- trapped in growing poverty and abandonment. It's a process-narrative of devolution that makes you feel helpless and angry and sad. It's saved from mawkishness by the natural energy of the children playing the roles of the four kids. And if it survives, its not because of its treatment of a social issue so much as for its evocation of the precise details of childhood.

There are two main subjects here. One is criminal neglect: the story is loosely based on events that happened in Tokyo in 1988. The other is the private, often secret, lives of children. Koreeda began as a documentary filmmaker and this seems to have given him exceptional skill in working with people and capturing their natural reactions. The winning, tragic children in "Nobody Knows," four half-siblings with different fathers and the same childish, selfish mother, never seem to be acting and often no doubt aren't. Nonetheless the subtlety of expression in the delicate, mobile, beautiful face of the older boy, young Yûya Yagira, was such that it won him the Best Actor award at Cannes last year.

Also important is Koreeda's gift for detail, his meditative examinations of fingernails, feet, a toy piano, video games, pieces of paper, objects strewn around a room, the hundreds of little soft drink bottles that are everywhere in Japan, plants, dirt, all the small things children see because they're closer to the ground. And the things they accept because they're defenseless and innocent, but also incredibly adaptable.

Akira, who's only ten and whose voice changed during year spent making the movie, is in charge. As their mother's absences become lengthier and the children finally seem to be abandoned for good, money runs out. Akira is captain of a sinking ship, a somber duty, but he and his little sisters and brother keep finding time to laugh and play.

Koreeda's a passionately serious filmmaker: the two better known of his earlier fiction films deal with death and loss and here he considers as a given the worst of human carelessness and indifference both by society and the individual. "Maborosi" (1995) was a homage to Ozu but without Ozu's sense of social connectedness; it begins with an isolated couple in the city and chronicles a young widow's second marriage in the country through a slow pastiche of observed daily scenes where event and even dialogue are minimal concerns. The content of "Maborosi" is too thin, but the images and color are exquisite and the sequences of natural, unrehearsed-looking scenes achieve an impressively rich, beautiful, zen-like calm. "After Life" (1998) uses actual recollections of older people talking to the camera to build up a fantasy about dead souls held temporarily in a bureaucratic pre-Heaven limbo being asked to choose a single favorite memory to take with them into eternity: the effect is perplexing, thought-provoking, charming, and with great economy of means, cinematic.

"Nobody Knows" isn't as brilliant or resolved as "After Life" or as exquisitely visual as "Maborosi," but for all its rambling excessive length it delivers a quantity of undigested patient misery and joy that will evoke such noble antecedents from the classic world of cinematic humanism as Clément's "Forbidden Games," De Sica's "Bicycle Thief," and the homeless father and son living on garbage in Kurosawa's Do-des-ka-den.

What's new here though is a sense of the encompassing otherness of big modern cities and the stoicism and resiliency of childhood (and perhaps also of the Japanese personality). Keiko, the childish, weak, spoiled mother (played effectively -- we instantly hate her -- by You, who's some sort of pop star in Japan), sneaks three of her four children into the new apartment and tells them they can't go out, can't show themselves even on the balcony. (In the real event, this was largely because they were illegitimate and had no papers, but here the explanation is that their noise may get them evicted.) Only Akira can leave, and she won't let him or the others go to school. They're prisoners of their urban anonymity and of an impersonal contemporary society.

As in Andrew Berkin's "Cement Garden," the children also pretend everything's okay to escape the cruelty of the social welfare system. We watch agonizingly -- and many writers say the movie's somewhat too long; it does feel thus especially during the first hour -- but this time Koreeda's world is more direct and specific than before and there's plenty of talk. The children chatter among themselves. Eventually they go out and mix a bit by day with other children. Akira even talks to himself; he has to, because there's no adult coaching him so he must impersonate an elder adviser.

Whatever its roughness and excess, "Nobody Knows" is intense and powerful film-making. Koreeda has put his whole heart and soul into this movie and with it achieves an experience you can't shrug off. Nor will you forget the kids, especially the beautiful boy, Yûya Yagira, who may be growing inch by inch into a star even as we speak.

In Tokyo, the reckless single mother Keiko (You) moves to a small apartment with her twelve years old son Akira Fukushima (Yûya Yagira) and hidden in the luggage, his siblings Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura), Shigeru (Hiei Kimura) and Yuki (Momoko Shimizu). The children have different fathers and do not have schooling, but they have a happy life with their mother. When Keiko finds a new boyfriend, she leaves the children alone, giving some money to Akira and assigning him to take care of his siblings. When the money finishes, Akira manages to find means to survive with the youngsters without power supply, gas or water at home, and with the landlord asking for the rental.

"Dare mo Shiranai" is a sensitive movie based on a true and very sad story. The performances of the children are amazing, highlighting the look of Yûya Yagira, and the drama is developed in a slow, but suitable pace. The direction is effective and the music score is absolutely adequate to the film. However, living in Rio de Janeiro, where we see homeless children begging on the streets everywhere, the terrible situation of Akira and his siblings does not impress the way it certainly does in First World countries. The abandoned children of the film have an apartment to live and food to eat, what does not happen in Third World countries, where famine children live on the streets in a sadder and unacceptable reality. The open conclusion is a little disappointing, since it does not bring any message of hope or lack of hope to the poor children. It seems that life goes on only. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Ninguém Pode Saber" ("Nobody Can Know")