Serdar | Genji Press

Red Lion follows a pattern laid down by many of the best movies in that it attempts to do many things at once and succeeds at all of them. It’s set in pre-modern Japan, so it’s a rousing samurai adventure; it’s a comedy of manners and errors; it’s a sly satire on the nature of power and heroism; and it stars the indispensable Toshiro Mifune in one of his best performances. All of the bases have been touched.

The film deals with, in fictionalized form, a real incident that took place in Japan’s pre-modern history. Shortly before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Imperial forces were sent into the countryside to foment rebellion against the Shogunate by promising tax cuts, but when the peasantry realized the throne had no intention of following through on their promises, they rebelled. The messengers for the throne had to be branded as traitors to quell the uprising. It wasn’t until decades later that the scapegoats were absolved and honored as national heroes.

Nobody Knows begins with a mother and son moving into a new apartment somewhere in Tokyo — an ordinary scene, except that two of their suitcases seem to be…well, fidgeting. They contain two younger children, another daughter and son, who are being smuggled in against the landlord’s wishes. A fourth one, a second daughter, sneaks in after hours.

There is something terribly wrong here, of course, but one of the most remarkable things about Nobody Knows is that it’s told more or less seamlessly from the childrens’ points of view. What we would perceive as being out of kilter is for them simply the way their lives have always been lived. They see nothing wrong with packing their siblings into suitcases and smuggling them into their new home — mostly, as the film suggests, because their mother is able to make it seem like the most natural thing.

The oldest son, Akira (Yuya Yagira) is, as her mother says at the beginning of Nobody Knows, a “very mature child,” and it is his maturity that will be the saving grace of his family. There is something strangely blowsy and not-quite-all-there about his mother (pop singer You [rhymes with “Go”]); she reminds one of the equally off-center Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence. The children are for the most part cheerful and well-behaved: the youngest two are happy with toys and TV, while Akira and Kyoko (the older daughter) deal with the fact that their mother simply isn’t equipped to do her job.