Friday, April 27
Nobody Knows (maps 1)
dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan 2004

Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers and have never been to school. The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note, charging her oldest boy to look after the others. And so begins the children's odyssey, a journey nobody knows. Though engulfed by the cruel fate of abandonment, the four children do their best to survive in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules. When they are forced to engage with the world outside their cocooned universe, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses. Their innocent longing for their mother, their wary fascination toward the outside world, their anxiety over their increasingly desperate situation, their inarticulate cries, their kindness to each other, their determination to survive on wits and courage.

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"Nobody Knows," by the often excellent Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, is one of those special movies that can give us a new way of seeing. With immaculate skill and heart-rending compassion, it transports us into a whole new world, shining and dangerous. Kore-eda (the director of "Maborosi" and "After Life") takes us on a journey into the special domain of childhood, a voyage joyous, shattering—and supremely convincing.

With a gentle, luminous skill, Kore-eda shows us a year in the lives of four modern-day Tokyo children, ages 4 to 12, who are abandoned by their mother in their apartment and forced to fend for themselves. Coping with the world is something they've never really learned. Three of the children—a boy, 7, and two girls, 10 and 4—were under the radar even before the abandonment because the mother concealed their identity from the landlady in order to secure the room. Only the eldest boy, 12, has had contact with the world outside.

"Nobody Knows" was shot chronologically, over one year, from fall to summer 2002, and we see the children grow markedly (most obviously Akira) as the story progresses. We also see near-real behavior. The four nonprofessional child actors and You, along with Hanae Kan as Saki, the hooky-playing rich girl Akia meets outside, worked in an improvisatory way, often adding lines and action to the meticulously planned but flexible script.

This method—which recalls Mike Leigh or John Cassavetes but is closer to a fusion of documentary and fiction than either—results in a keen sense of reality, augmented by Yamazaki Yutaka's brilliant hand-held camera-work. The film's images are kinetic, full and bright. This is the way we see the world as children—and why the movie, despite its tragic subject, has that childlike feel of a world full of sunlight, a world at play. At the end, we love these children. And we can only wish their world and their guardians had loved them as well. - Michael Wilmington, ChicagoTribune.com