Hirokazu Kore-eda is arguably Japan’s greatest director, and his latest film, Broker, which opens in Israel on Thursday, examines his usual themes of family, the pressure of surviving in an unforgiving economy, and the redemptive power of love in a way that is consistently moving and engrossing.
As is often the case with his movies, Broker tells the story of people considered marginal by mainstream society who come together to form a kind of family, and whose lives are changed in a profound way by the connections they form. Armistead Maupin, the author of The Tales of the City books, wrote about forming a “logical family” rather than a “biological family,” and that is what Kore-eda’s characters do in Broker, as they have in many of his movies. In Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, a group of grifters posed convincingly as a family and were undone by their decision to take in another needy child. His characters are flawed but likable screwups and misfits whom we change our minds about as their stories unfold, and this has never been truer than in Broker, a movie about two men who sell abandoned babies.
What is Broker?
Broker, which is set in Korea, gets going when a young woman leaves her baby by a church “baby box,” places set up so women can safely leave the children they are not able to raise.
But two men who grew up in an orphanage, Ha Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho, who won the Best Actor Award at Cannes for this performance) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), have figured out a way to take these babies before the church can get to them and sell them. They may sound reprehensible, but at least part of their motivation is pure. They see that the mother, Moon So-young (Ji-eun Lee), a very young prostitute who is on the run because she has committed a crime, has left a note saying she will be back for the baby. Given their background, the men know that because of this note, the baby will not be put up for adoption and will spend his whole childhood in an institution, as they did. During the movie, they visit the home where they grew up, and it doesn’t seem so bad, but they have carried around the feeling of abandonment their whole lives. When they meet Moon So-young, who actually does return to the church looking for her baby, they convince her that the best thing is to sell the child to a loving family that doesn’t want to go through the years-long adoption process. And so a strange, bittersweet road movie is set in motion.
Ha Sang-hyun is a tailor and divorced dad whose daughter doesn’t want to see him, and he is in debt to a gangster, who has thugs tail him as he drives around Korea, looking for the right family to buy the baby. Two earnest but bumbling female detectives, determined to arrest the men for selling babies, also follow. The two brokers, the mother and the baby are joined by a child from the orphanage where the men grew up who sneaks aboard their van and is excited by the sights along the way. His enthusiasm is infectious.
IF YOU don’t know Kore-eda’s movies, such as the wonderful films After Life, Our Little Sister, After the Storm and Still Walking, Broker would be a good introduction to his work. In his films, characters often visit the seashore and, like people walking along the water’s edge who step back when the surf comes too close, the director flirts with sentimentality but moves away, back into a darker world, when things threaten to become saccharine. He creates characters you love spending time with, but places them firmly in a tough environment where they struggle to survive.
The cast is wonderful, from the leads to those with the smallest parts. Song Kang-ho, who starred as the patriarch of a family trapped in poverty in the first non-English-language movie ever to win a Best Picture Oscar, Parasite, gives an especially layered and winning performance here. He convinces us that the hero is good-hearted enough to want what is best for the child and foolish enough to get himself into a situation where he needs money so badly that selling a baby seems like a good option.
As the trip unfolds, the characters in Broker bond like a family, but, given their situation, you know that it is only a matter of time before the detectives or the thugs put an end to their idyll. But that doesn’t make the ride any less sweet.