Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Broker’: Film Review | Cannes 2022
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Nobody makes films about families quite like Hirokazu Kore-eda, whether they are biological families or makeshift groups thrown together by circumstance and need. Four years after one of the Japanese writer-director’s best, Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters, about a rag-tag bunch of petty thieves, he returns to Cannes with another assembly of law-breaking misfits from society’s margins, this time in South Korea. An ensemble piece that starts slow before steadily getting pulled along by its gentle road-movie engine, Broker is led with immense warmth by Parasite’s tragicomic patriarch Song Kang-ho. His familiar face and Kore-eda’s revered reputation should help Neon draw appreciative audiences.
Song’s recognition factor aside, this is an egalitarian work in which every one of the key cast makes an indelible impression, right down to the adorable baby boy who’s the story’s catalyst.
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It marks Kore-eda’s second feature made and set outside Japan, after 2019’s study of a French screen legend who placed career over family, The Truth. That film brought playful wit and tender observation to a spiky relationship between Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, playing a famous mother and daughter, their starry double-act an anomaly in Kore-eda’s filmography. Broker is more in line with his regard for ordinary people in the Japanese films that put him on the map and made him the heir to Ozu and Naruse.
Kore-eda has a knack for making melodrama play like social realism, and his embrace of sentimentality here — entirely earned — shows why he’s considered such a master, especially in the film’s second half, with scene after scene of piercing poignancy.
The aforementioned baby, Woo-sung, is left by visibly distressed young mother So-young (Lee Ji-eun) one rainy night at the Busan Family Church’s “baby box.” That repository for abandoned infants is basically a hatch in the wall that contains a baby basket and blankets, with soothing lullaby music piped in. So-young is observed and followed by detectives Su-jin (Doona Bae) and Lee (Lee Joo-young), who are working on uncovering illegal baby brokers operating out of the church.
Those traffickers, however, are no hardened ring of black-market baby traders, just two financially struggling individuals looking to make some cash and place the unwanted kids in a good home. Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) is the inside man working part-time at the church, while his older associate Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) runs a laundry service regularly hit up by extortionate local gangsters.
Early on, Detective Lee makes judgmental comments about baby boxes encouraging irresponsible mothers: “Don’t have a baby if you’re going to abandon it.” But Kore-eda’s compassionate investigation touches on the many complex reasons a young mother might have for giving up a child — a subject that acquires heightened relevance as the U.S. barges ahead with legislative measures to remove a woman’s right to choose. On the other hand, some may oversimplify it as a pro-life statement, advocating pointedly in a late scene for every child’s right to be born.
When So-young has a change of heart and returns to the church to reclaim her son, she finds the baby gone, with no trace of him in the facility’s records. Her threat to go to the police prompts Dong-soo and Sang-hyun to come clean, playing down the monetary side of their interest and somehow getting suspicious So-young on board with the plan to hit the road and meet with potential adoptive parents. The two detectives tail them, aiming to wrap up their investigation by arresting the brokers in the act.
Along the way, the group acquires an additional passenger in spirited preteen boy Hae-jin, who runs away from an orphanage where Dong-soo has old connections. The filter-free kid functions like a mischievous Puck figure, breaking down distances among them and encouraging a familial closeness that prods each of them to be less guarded about his or her damage. This emerges naturally from their interactions in Kore-eda’s characteristically understated style.
The biggest revelations — and it must be said, the most incongruously movie-ish for Kore-eda — come from the initially closed-off So-young. The harrowing difficulties that led her to the baby box come to light both inside Sang-hyun’s van and in her secret conversations with the detectives, who promise leniency in exchange for help nailing their target. But even the cops start to consider the traffickers with new eyes as they witness first-hand the kindness and care that binds the group more closely together.
Much of this might have been formulaic in less artful hands, but Kore-eda has an unfaltering lightness of touch, a way of injecting emotional veracity and spontaneity into every moment.
A Ferris wheel ride late in the film, in particular, exemplifies the director’s sleight of hand at transforming what could be pure schmaltz into sentiment of a more ennobling type, as Sang-hyun redirects his paternal sorrows into comforting a scared Hae-jin, while Dong-soo shares with So-young the abandonment issues that have accompanied him since his orphaned childhood. In a moving exchange, he shyly advances the notion that all of them could form their own family. However, Kore-eda has a less straightforward, more subdued solution in mind.
There’s no magical eraser to wipe away transgressions and provide everyone with instant forgiveness. But there’s an opening up to new possibilities, even with the seemingly businesslike Su-jin. Though the cop’s plot strands sometimes feel like narrative overload, her capacity for human understanding and her own yearnings are suggested by Kore-eda in a gorgeous homage to Paul Thomas Anderson involving the Aimee Mann song, “Wise Up.”
The conclusion reveals a generosity of spirit, a touching faith in human nature, even if it doesn’t match the affecting impact of Kore-eda’s most sublime work. It suggests that raising children is an undertaking that benefits from a whole spectrum of influences — a point so clear it shouldn’t have to be stated and yet somehow carries quiet urgency here.
Performances across the board are fully inhabited, graced by brushstrokes that give equal attention to moments of sadness and unforced humor. Lee Ji-eun is especially strong as the troubled but resilient So-young.
Lovingly crafted in every department, the film benefits from the fluid rhythms of Kore-eda’s editing, echoed in a melodic score by Jung Jae-il that spans from acoustic to orchestral. And the unfussy visuals of gifted cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo — whose impressive credits include Parasite, Snowpiercer and Burning — range from the ineffable despair of the rain-drenched opening to the possibility of hope and deliverance as a train cuts through magnificent countryside. Even second-tier Kore-eda reconfirms the filmmaker as an essential voice.
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