The Political and Social Depths of the Melodrama, After an Audiovisual: Essay by Francisco Dias

Melodrama’s adaptability is a direct cause of the way in which it can also be transmedial, transgenre and transnational, finding new ways of expression outside of the classic confinements of Hollywood’s excesses. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Manbiki kazok, also known as Shoplifters, is an example of a film that belongs to the melodrama category, but that explores the pathos and feeling that are characteristic of the genre in a way that not only is it not divorced of the political but contains within itself a fierce rebuke of the pressures of a capitalist society that underlines its emotional burden.