Baby Drama
Hirokazu Kore-eda stays on book for his first foray into Korean cinema with more found families and social pariah in ‘Broker’.
Broker
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda • Writer: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring: Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, Bae Doona, Lee Ji-eun, Lee Joo-young, Im Seung-soo
South Korea • 2hrs 10mins
Opens Hong Kong June 23 • IIA
Grade: B
A pair of baby brokers, a hooker with an unwanted infant and a smart-mouthed orphan make up the family at the core of Japanese director (and writer and editor) Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first Korean film, Broker | 브로커 (and his second non-Japanese film after 2019’s The Truth, France), a gentle, rambling, occassionally funny and intensely Kore-eda addition into the director’s filmography. Kore-eda refers to Broker as a companion piece to his superior 2018 Oscar-nominee and Palme d’Or-winner Shoplifters, and it’s easy to see why: Kore-eda has been making this film since his 2004 breakout, Nobody Knows, in one form or another. His focus on families – unconventional ones, shattering ones, rebuilding ones, created ones, often social outsiders – is transplanted to Korea, intially serving up a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance given the location, the cast and the various plot threads. He pulls them all back together by the end (which is too long in coming), but there’s more than a few hiccoughs along the way, at least for Kore-eda. That said, anyone who vibes with Kore-eda’s brand of humanism will be on board with Broker.
Almost the multi-generational travel hotels want
Late one rainy night, an anonymous young woman drops her infant son at the Baby Box of a Busan church. It’s an option for unwanted pregnancies across South Korea, and the idea of a woman just “throwing away” her baby pisses off judgmental detective Soo-jin (Bae Doona, Kore-eda’s Air Doll), who clearly has some kind of painful personal history involving children. She and her partner Lee (Lee Joo-young) have been tracking a pair of baby brokers working out of the church, Sang-hyeon (the inimitable Song Kang-ho, who rightfully won Cannes’ actor prize for his perfromance) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), and they’re close to busting them. They just need to catch them in the act. Elsewhere, a gangster type is murdered, and his wife, who knows he has another child somewhere, wants that baby.
But Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo’s best laid plans to sell their latest cargo go awry when the infant’s mother changes her mind and comes looking for her son. So-young, played by pop star Lee Ji-eun – IU – in a stellar, nuanced turn, is a tough as nails prostitute with a knotty past, and her mercenary side kicks in when she meets the black marketeers. Faster than you can say diaper rash, the brokers, So-young and her son, and an orphan from a facility near and dear to Dong-soo’s heart, Hae-jin (Im Seung-soo), embark on a road trip to find the baby, Woo-sung, a new family.
You bet there’s baby angst here
Broker deconstructs and reimagines the family structure in the way most of Kore-eda’s films do, and because of that several of the film’s more curious points and themes go unexplored. Lest we forget, the main characters sell babies illegally. No matter how cuddly and hang-dog Song makes him, Sang-heyon is a reprehensible person. Soo-jin’s bitchy runing commentary on So-young’s choices flirt with pro-life messaging at points, and Kore-eda never delves into the black market baby phenomenon from the desperate adopters’ POV (prospective parents include some famous faces, among them Kim Sae-byuk, Lee Dong-hwi and Park Hae-joon), or even the social cocktail that created the baby box to begin with. Then there’s the geographic disconnect. By placing the action in Korea and making a low-level thug and a powerful gangster’s wife fairly significant plot points, Kore-eda is priming audiences for the worst, and more importantly a turn towards a Bong Joon-ho/Park Chan-wook crime thriller. And not embracing the more comic elements more was a missed opportunity. Who knew Kore-eda could be funny?
But none of that has ever been Kore-eda’s raison d’être. His game is exploring the emotional undercurrents driving these broken people, and his focus the little intimacies that forge unlikely bonds. And he’s graceful in that; two quiet conversations on a ferris wheel bring Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo into sharp relief, and Hae-jin’s seemingly nonsense prattling compels a deeper, unspoken connection among them. It’s a “Kids say the darnedest things” mechanism, but in it’s the glue that holds this new family together. Ultimately Kore-eda the optimist trumps Bong or Park the pessimists, and ends on a hopeful note that speaks to our better angels. You just know Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo would wind up dead and So-young would be maimed beyond recognition – and still lose her baby – were Bong or Park left to their own devices. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind seeing that film. — DEK