Tough Kids

By RICHARD CORLISS

The winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actor award couldn't be at the ceremony last May. He was back home, in Tokyo, taking exams at his junior high school. Yuuya Yagira is 14, and the best reason to search out Hirokazu Koreeda's fact-based fable Nobody Knows.

The premise is simple: spend a year, four seasons, with four children who have been abandoned by their mother and left to survive in a small apartment without a social safety net. The way they do so, with a desperate resourcefulness, implicitly condemns Japan's welfare system and makes it clear that, in this family--this nation?--the younger generation is the more mature.

Koreeda, a worldwide art-house guru for his spectral memory film After Life, doesn't judge anyone, including the mother. His calm camera observes the four kids quickly falling into the roles of harried parents (the two eldest) or dutiful children (the two youngest). Akira (Yagira) is the dad, treating his sibs with a wondrously gentle authority.

When an arty director has an international hit, it's usually because audiences have been allowed to mistake it for something conventional. Viewers can see Koreeda's rigorously unsentimental film as a Spielberg lost-kids plot rendered in Japanese and in slow motion. And they can feast on the child actors, all of them unaffected and adorable. Yagira, with the smooth androgyny of an anime hero, is a real eye magnet; the camera, puppylike, practically licks his face. Yet this precocious thespian is a real kid. When he was finally handed his Best Actor trophy, he asked, "Can I take it home?" --By Richard Corliss