Broker movie review: The film is leavened by Hirokazu Koreeda’s light touch
How a child leaves almost no one untouched lies at the heart of this deeply humane story about people battling different kinds of loneliness, all on their own.
Directed by Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda (Shoplifters), it features two men who run a side business selling abandoned children to parents who desperately want one; a young mother who leaves her newborn and is committedly dispassionate towards him; two women cops trailing them who want to crack the case for a leg-up professionally; and a woman coming to terms with her husband’s infidelity.
They all find themselves connected with each other through Woo-sung. The infant is left by his mother So-young (Ji-eun Lee) outside a church in the baby boxes put up for women who want to similarly abandon kids. Watched by the two cops (the elder, resigned one played by Bae Doona; the younger, more flexible one by Lee Joo-young), a church volunteer, Dong-soo (Dong-won Gang), picks him and brings him to partner Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho). Sang-hyeon is an unassuming man, running a laundry shop, who having fallen in with some loan sharks needs the money to be made from selling the baby.
As he and Dong-soo set out to cut the deal for the baby, So-young finds them out and comes along.
What can be a story of deep distress and perhaps the worst kind of crime is leavened by Koreeda’s light touch, with Broker not burdened by neither overt sentimentality or mushiness, nor cold efficiency. Instead, as the story unfolds, we find each of its characters unfold intimately as people – not markedly dissimilar from each other.
Koreeda fleetingly touches upon deeper issues such as whether baby boxes actually help save children or only their “corrupt mothers”; should a woman be automatically loving towards her baby; and are fathers ever held as culpable for the “abandonment” as the mother.
Could the film have been better served by Koreeda dwelling upon these a little longer? Perhaps, as its length alone could have accommodated the same. Instead, the director never veers far from the deliberately light tone of Broker.
It’s also a story that, while it views the young, vulnerable So-young sympathetically, wants you to see the world from the perspective of children such as Woo-sung who are given up by their mothers – many of whom spend their lives in orphanages waiting either to be adopted or for the woman who left a note in their baby box “promising to come back”.
Dong-soo is one such orphan, as is Hae-jin (a lovely Seung-soo Im), who joins the others on the road, when the group make a stop at a home for children like the two of them.
But Koreeda makes no claims about a larger picture here. Broker is a film about this one baby, these three adults and Hae-jin, who are taking this ride across the towns of Korea, in a ramshackle van, meeting prospective parents, for illegal deals, answering questions such as about the baby’s eyebrows, and who, amidst all this, come together as a family.
While Song Kang-ho (Parasite) is characteristically good as the oldest of the group, who has seen everything come apart over his life, both Dong-won Gang and Ji-eun Lee grow on you as the two younger people carrying deep pain and unsaid feelings.
Among the many beautiful, unexpected scenes that bind Broker together, one has their characters suspended in the air on a Ferris Wheel, amidst the quiet, imagining another life, in another time. Another scene has all of them on their last night together, in darkness, thanking each other for the gift of life.
In whatever form it comes.
Broker movie director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Broker movie cast: Ji-eun Lee, Song Kang-ho, Dong-won Gang, Seung-soo Im, Bae Doona
Broker movie rating: 3.5 stars
