"Make Me Cry": Nobody Knows (2004)

“Yellow Ledbetter” is part of Pearl Jam lore, in that it a) has no fixed lyrics and yet b) inspires heartfelt crowd participation whenever it is played live, usually at the end of the night when you are at least a little bit slick with someone else’s sweat. It also has a certain amount of notoriety in that c) it didn’t make the record when the band released Ten in 1991. Imagine how good you have to be that Yellow fuckin’ Ledbetter doesn’t make the cut.

On the recording of the song that finally appeared on Lost Dogs in 2003 (12 years later), Mike McCready’s guitar solo is preceded by this lyrical instruction from Eddie Vedder:

“Make me cry.”

And then Mike does this. I have listened to this song hundreds of times and I have seen the band play it live probably a dozen times and McCready will break your heart every single time.

You know, but you go back anyway. Because.

How I feel sonically about “Yellow Ledbetter” is how I feel cinematically about Hirokazu Koreeda, a filmmaker who I first encountered a decade or so ago and who is now one of my auto-watches. I will buy whatever this guy is selling. For a while his earlier films were pretty hard to come by, but in the last few years - certainly since Shoplifters won at Cannes in 2018 - it’s been easier to find them on DVD, and Channel 4 have screened most of them at one point or another.

The first film of Koreeda’s that I ever saw was Nobody Knows, made in 2004. This was Koreeda’s fourth film and the third one that he directed, wrote and produced himself. Although it isn’t what initially drew me to his films, it is notable that his films are full of siblings. I don’t know if there’s a filmmaker working today who is more invested in this relationship. It gets folded into the more general idea that Koreeda is interested in unconventional family units and ‘found’ families, but the sibling connection is always a crucial factor in this. Our Little Sister has a coterie of adult sisters embracing their younger half sister and inviting her to live with them; Nobody Knows is the brutal inverse, an older brother who is barely old enough to care for himself, charged with the care and survival of his three younger siblings.

I taught Nobody Knows for a few years on my (sadly now defunct) family in film module, until the number of students grumbling that it was “too long” and “too slow” surpassed the number who were mesmerised by it (I am a staunch believer in a 120 minute max film, but also give me 140 minutes of Koreeda over 140 minutes of sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads the MCU). Now I have Shoplifters and Our Little Sister on the syllabus instead, but Nobody Knows still has a resonance for me because it’s what got me into Koreeda’s films in the first place.

So I rewatched Nobody Knows recently, which is probably the fourth time I’ve seen it. It’s exquisite. Firstly, Yuya Yagira’s performance is phenomenal. He won the Best Actor award at Cannes for his portrayal of Akira, still the youngest person to do so. All the kids in the film are great, but Yagira can do so much with his face and the subtleties of his expression. He’s 13/14 playing 12 and Koreeda really captures him on the cusp of being a teenager: he can simultaneously look like a little kid and an almost-teenage boy. Akira is weighed down by the (un)privilege of knowledge for much of the film, because he knows that their mother is likely not returning and he knows that they are running out of money, but tries to shield his younger siblings from this for as long as possible. All this is physically visible in Akira’s expressions and the way he moves, and yet he is also capable of supreme lightness. When he gets to join in the baseball game at the end of the film - even with tragedy looming back home - he is so infused with joy as he runs around, it radiates through the screen.

Koreeda is great at blending joy and anxiety in very close proximity. All the moments of unchecked happiness - Shigeru with his action figures, Akira playing video games with his friends, the kids venturing to the concrete park and growing their plants on the balcony - are marked with a feeling of precarity. When one plant pot (a plastic noodle cup packed with purloined soil) falls off the balcony, it’s just a plastic pot but also a warning light goes on. You can’t escape the sense of anticipatory melancholy; something is coming. Something is coming, but you keep watching.

In short, Koreeda is a master at getting you to feel something without resorting to melodrama or spectacle - there’s enough in a single image to splinter a little bit of something inside you. All those beautifully mundane ‘pillow’ shots! The red toy piano with a broken leg, the tiny shoots poking up through the concrete, the envelope with the sums scratched on the back of it. Careful and ordinary and heartbreaking. Don’t let it put you off.