BROKER: All in the Family

Few filmmakers are capable of exploring the nature of what makes a family with as keen a sense of compassion as Hirokazu Kore-eda. The ties that bind his films’ families are not necessarily blood, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful, or any less important to the people united by them. In his Palme d’Or winning drama Shoplifters, one such family is brought together by the horrors of poverty; they might technically be criminals, hovering on the margins of society and shoplifting in order to survive, but they’re still far better at caring for the neglected daughter of their neighbors than the girl’s birth parents.

Broker, Kore-eda’s latest, is meant to be a companion piece to Shoplifters. And while it doesn’t quite reach the emotional heights of its predecessor, it is still a lovely depiction of a found family brought together in the strangest of ways—this time, by one young woman’s decision to abandon her baby at a church in the South Korean city of Busan.

“This Car is Filled with Liars”

So-young (Lee Ji-eun, also known as the pop star IU) is a young single mother who decides to abandon her infant son, Woo-sung, outside of a church where there is a baby box—a place where children can be left anonymously in the hope that they’ll go on to find a better life than the one they were born into. What So-young doesn’t know is that a worker at this church, Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), is operating an illegal baby trafficking business with his friend and partner, Sang-hyeon (the phenomenal Song Kang-ho). Together, they take the babies left in the box and sell them to wealthy couples who are unable to have a child of their own and unwilling to jump through the various bureaucratic hoops that comprise the official adoption system in South Korea.

When So-young returns to the church, she discovers Dong-soo and Sang-hyeon’s plans for Woo-sung and, much to the men’s initial dismay, decides to accompany them on their journey to sell her baby so that she can interview Woo-sung’s potential new parents herself. What follows is a road trip unlike any other that takes these three misfits—plus an orphaned boy, Hae-jin (Im Seung-soo), who decides to tag along for the ride—across the Korean peninsula in search of a proper family for Woo-sung, becoming a strange sort of family themselves along the way.

As Sang-hyeon and company make their way from city to city in search of the right buyers, a steely police detective, Soo-jin (Bae Doona), follows close behind, ready to do whatever it takes to catch these baby brokers red-handed. However, the more time she spends following the criminals she means to arrest, the more she starts to sympathize with them—especially So-young, who is carrying another dark secret of her own.

“Thank You for Being Born”

With a running time of two hours and ten minutes, Broker sags a bit in the middle portion of the film. Yet the film’s slow, leisurely pace allows one to take the time to get to know these characters and to savor every moment that we share with them. In some ways, Soo-jin functions as a stand-in for the audience; one might initially pause at Broker’s premise, reluctant to root for baby traffickers and a mother willing to sell her own child, but as the film progresses and more of these characters’ pasts are revealed, it becomes all too easy to understand how they’ve all come to this. It’s characteristic of Kore-eda to find and showcase the humanity inherent in characters that would too often be relegated to the underbelly of society, showing us that they too are worthy of love and light.

There is an emotional delicacy to Broker that is emphasized by Jung Jae-il’s elegant, minimalist musical score and the naturalistic performances of the all-star cast, who truly do feel like a family. Song, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for playing lovable eccentric Sang-hyeon, walks the tightrope of comedy and tragedy better than almost any other actor working today; in one of the film’s most heartbreaking scenes (and yet one not without an undercurrent of bleak humor), he attempts to reconnect with his own young daughter, only to discover that she and her mother no longer care to have anything to do with him.

The ensemble surrounding Song is just as capable of tugging on one’s heartstrings, albeit fortunately in a way that never veers too far into sentimentality. As Dong-soo, Gang gets some of the film’s funniest lines (“You never went to the military. You were in jail.”) as well as some of its most emotionally raw moments. The multitalented Lee is remarkable as desperate single mother So-young, proving that she’s just as capable an actress as she is a singer-songwriter—no small feat if you’re familiar with her music! And Bae takes on the tough role of what may at first seem like Broker’s antagonist (though really, as in Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, it’s society and all of its cruelties and unfairness that is actually the film’s villain) and renders Soo-jin a complex figure entirely worthy of the audience’s empathy.

Conclusion:

As in Shoplifters, there is no easy happy ending for the found family at the center of Broker; this refusal to sugarcoat harsh realities is a large part of what makes Kore-eda’s films so devastating. Yet in the film’s final moments, one is left with a burgeoning sense of hope for the future—a lovely feeling to carry into a new year of moviegoing.

Broker is currently in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. It expands throughout the U.S. on January 13, 2023, and opens in the UK on February 3, 2023. You can find more international release dates here.

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