Broker (2022)

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Broker (2022) – H. Kore-eda

I’ve been a fan of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s work going back to After Life (1998) which I saw in London when I was in the UK for a job interview and Maborosi (1995) which I subsequently picked up on videocassette.  His films have always been unpredictable (in that they don’t follow a formula) and humanistic (in that they have empathy for the characters and show them warts and all). Broker was filmed in South Korea with a Korean cast, featuring Song Kang-ho (best known for his work with Bong Joon-ho in Parasite, 2019, or Memories of Murder, 2003; he won the best actor award at Cannes for this film), following a less successful (but still on point) venture in France (The Truth, 2019, with Deneuve and Binoche). Kore-eda has spent a lot of time focused on family relationships (and as such may be the natural heir of Yasujiro Ozu’s shomin-geki genre) and Broker continues the theme of his Cannes-winning Shoplifters (2018) that a “family” might be defined as any group of individuals that chooses to be one. Here, we find Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) working as “brokers” who take abandoned babies from a local church group’s “baby box” and sell them on the black market to wannabe parents who cannot meet Korea’s strict adoption regulations.  Dong-soo was abandoned in a similar way as a child (left at an orphanage) and so these are not ordinary brokers but really care about who they are selling to.  So when the mother of their latest acquisition (a baby named Woo-sung) turns up, they are happy to work with her to find the right parents for her child. Apparently actress Lee Ji-eun is a pop star in Korea but her acting is strong and she fits into the ensemble who are, unbeknownst to them, being tracked by the police.  At the same time, Sang-hyun is being pursued by gangsters to whom he owes a gambling debt and Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun) may also have a criminal past. So, Kore-eda builds suspense about where this is all going to end up. But it is true that the film does verge closer to sentimentality than some of the director’s other films, even if he doesn’t leave the characters where you might expect them to be, if this were a Hollywood film.