Spoilers for Nobody Knows (2004) and I’m Still Here (2024).
A group of four children, three in unwashed, tattered hand-me-downs, one in a school uniform, walk home holding their groceries. The youngest stays behind for a moment to grab quarters left behind in the vending machine, happily shouting to the others that he found some. We know how this story ends. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2004 film, Nobody Knows, has a lot of moments like this; inferred gaps in time that could lead to a number of different paths, even if we’re smart enough to know which path was taken.
Over the course of the about a year that the film takes place, months are skipped over, because for as upsetting as the movie is, it knows not to reiterate information already given. For much of the film, this is a kindness. For a few moments, it’s a cruelty.
Nobody Knows follows Akira, the 12-year-old de facto patriarch of a group of four half-siblings left to their own devices in a Tokyo apartment after their mother leaves with no sign of returning. Shy, observant Akira is able to manage their pseudo-Bohemian lifestyle for a brief moment while maintaining his morals, but…we know how this story goes. With no authority, Akira becomes the authority, and through the sweat beads forming on his brow, we see the stress start to get to him. He does a kindness for his younger brother, Shigeru, who’s fled their sanctuary of a filthy apartment in the meanwhile. Akira finds the boy playing with toy tanks with random children, them seemingly paying no mind to Shigeru’s hygiene, one of many great sources of poverty-induced shame for the pre-teen. Akira destroys the tank and tells him to not even bother coming home. If your eyes were closed and the voice of young actor Yuya Yagira were pitched down, it would sound just like a distant father scolding a child.
My favorite moment in Walter Salles’ 2024 biographical film I’m Still Here comes when the young Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the only boy in a house of four sisters and a grieving mother, destroys the doll of one of his young sisters in a fit of rage. Marcelo, later the man who wrote the memoir on which the film is adapted, has a lot to be angry about, his father murdered by the Brazilian dictatorship and his family under constant surveillance and torture. The government even murders his dog, and Marcelo, unable to process the complicated and horrible emotions that not even his adult mother can handle, destroys something precious to someone he loves. It almost reads like an abusive father lashing out at his kids.
In the film, Marcelo is around twelve, the same age as Akira, and watching these two boys be handed such cruelty and indifference by the powers “meant to protect them”, government and parents respectively, it’s a miracle they don’t become fully encompassed by the violence handed down to them that they pay forward in these moments.
We know how Marcelo turned out. I’m Still Here has even longer time jumps than Nobody Knows, tossing whole decades to the wind as the story flies from 1971 to 2014, so we see the man Marcelo Rubens Paiva turned into, and the movie is not subtle about that being a direct result of his mother bearing as much of the burden as she possibly can, shielding all of her children from the rampant muck that has infected their lives forever.
In Nobody Knows, a few scenes after destroying Shigeru’s toy, Akira is sitting on the other side of a fence watching boys his age play baseball. Be it a school program or an extracurricular, Akira has neither the time nor the resources to allow himself to engage in what is, in purely practical terms, a waste of time. The coach notices Akira and asks him what year in school he is. We don’t hear Akira’s answer, only cut to him donning a leftover uniform and playing a game. The coach teaches him how to hit, and in Kore-eda and cinematographer Yutaka Yamasaki’s sun-bleached photography, Akira has a good day where he’s not in charge and gets to revert to being a 12-year-old boy again. One would like to imagine the scenes not put into the film showing Akira and the couch creating a bond, fleshing out that surrogate father-son relationship they both got a brief but gorgeous moment of. But we know how this story ends. Maybe it was too much work, maybe Akira never came back to that baseball field, maybe the coach asked him politely not to return; no matter the reason, that’s the only scene in the film on the baseball field. I would have liked there to be more scenes on the baseball field.
In the final moments of Nobody Knows, Akira has allowed himself to not be totally consumed by responsibility and grief, laughing with his siblings and walking down the street. One wonders how long this nice coach’s intervention lasts, and if it’s a strong enough force to hold at bay the hardening that comes from every other impossible choice and carved-in scar.
Masculinity in film is tough, not just because hard lines of gender are often limiting in discussions of art. Young masculinity is, then, especially tough, because you have these characters that traditionally should be unburdened, and a little stupid, and a little cruel, put in situations that “turn boys to men too fast”. Akira and Marcelo are not put on the path to become men, they’re put on the path to become cruel, adult boys, stunted and volatile. The only thing that puts a stop to either of their paths is the intervention, the guiding hand of a parental figure that holds you tightly and shows a different path forward. For Marcelo, it’s Eunice Paiva, who walked her family through unspeakable evil and came out of the other side not unscathed, but alive. For Akira, one can dream. But we fear we may already know how this story ends.
In the 1996 section of I’m Still Here, Marcelo and one of his sisters discuss when they fully realized their dad wasn’t coming back, and the point of Eunice donating their father’s clothes comes up as a possible line in the sand, a daunting decision to move on that would take a horrible chunk out of anybody. In Nobody Knows, Akira storms his mother’s room and throws her clothes on the ground to sell them for food.
We know how this story will end.
Davey Peppers 