Malign Neglect
Abandoned children fend for themselves in lyrical but frustrating "Nobody Knows"

Childhood has rarely seemed as lyrical and courageous, yet fragile and endangered as in the Japanese coming-of-age drama Nobody Knows. Inspired by a real-life 1988 news story, filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda recounts a tale of four young siblings left alone in a rented Tokyo apartment to fend for themselves after their single mother disappears from their lives.

Hirokazu's prologue explains that he has fictionalized the personalities of the children involved and the details of their story. This gives him plenty of room to indulge in lyricism and metaphor about the tenacity of these kids struggling to bloom under such perilous and constricted circumstances. Yet as evocative as the film often is, Hirokazu is guilty of his own act of abandonment, leaving the story oddly unfinished, despite the film's nearly two and-a-half-hour length.

Pretty young mother Keiko (played by the Japanese TV personality who goes by the single name You) moves into a new apartment with her 12-year-old son Akira (Yagira Yuya). After meeting the landlords, they unpack their stuff—including two more small children smuggled in inside suitcases. After nightfall, Akira goes to the train station for his 10-year-old sister, whom he ushers up the back stairs under cover of darkness.

The kids all have different fathers (none of whom are still around); their births have never been recorded, nor do any of them attend school. The younger kids live in perpetual hiding while responsible Akira ventures out into the world to shop, cooks the meals, and looks after the others—including his vivacious, fun-loving mom, hardly more than a child herself.

Mom lives in a dream world, believing every new man she meets will be the one to marry her and buy them all a home of their own. The morning Akira finds an envelope full of yen with a note that Mom will be gone for awhile, he copes as he always has—buying groceries, paying bills, tracking down some of Mom's recent boyfriends for extra cash. But days lengthen into weeks, months, time reckoned by the kids' lengthening hair and nails, and shrinking clothes and shoes.

When the money runs out, Akira resorts to accepting deli leftovers from clerks at the grocery. When their power is turned off, he fills buckets with water from a public drinking fountain, then risks shepherding all the kids out into the park to brush their teeth, wash their clothes, and, well, play; it's a measure of how completely they've fallen below the social radar that nobody notices.

The cluelessnes of the outside world is the point (hence the film's title), but Hirokazu's narrative isn't always persuasive. It's plausible that Akira won't go to the police for fear the family will be split up, or that the grocer is too preoccupied to notice Akira's increasingly feral appearance. But when the landlady comes for the unpaid rent and finds three illegal children living in genteel squalor, you'd think she'd at least take steps to get her money, if not interfere on the kids' behalf. And we know too little about the lonely schoolgirl who befriends Akira to understand why she never tells anyone about the family's desperate plight.

In real life, the kids did fall between the cracks, but Hirokazu's dramatizaton never fully explains how. He's more interested in the poetry of childhood blossoming against all odds, like the wildflowers pushing up through a grill in a concrete lot from which the kids extract seeds to grow green plants on their tiny balcony. This is a lovely recurring image, yet we begin to wonder: how did these little urban kids learn the folkway of nurturing seeds into plants? Certainly not from their mother.

Meticulous Hirokazu spent a year in production, shooting in sequence, allowing his extraordinary child actors to grow naturally onscreen. As his tale darkens, he never milks it for easy sentimentality, yet his reticence becomes an abdication of his job as storyteller. The film's open ending may invite us to ponder the possibility of other kids out there in similar straits about whom nobody knows, but it's also an exercise in frustration, leaving us in dramatic free-fall after we've invested so much concern in these young lives.

NOBODY KNOWS With Yagira Yuya. Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. An IFC Films release. Not rated. 141 minutes. In Japanese with English subtitles. (**1/2)
Review published in Good Times, March 17, 2005