I’m not sure there’s a director alive whose films I look forward to more than those of Hirokazu Kore-eda. I first discovered him quite by accident back in 2006, when I was laid up with a broken ankle. A roommate of mine took my library card down to the local branch and picked out a handful of random DVDs for me to watch while I was couch-ridden. Kore-eda’s 2004 film Nobody Knows was among them, and I’ve been enamored with the Japanese director’s work ever since. (Coincidentally, there were two other films in that library stack that I now rank among my favorites of all time: China’s Devil’s on the Doorstep and Brazil’s City of God. That random haul proved fruitful indeed.)
In Broker, Kore-eda continues his career-long exploration of how families – traditional or otherwise – cope with everyday life under less-than-ideal conditions. As is often the case, Kore-eda’s characters rarely follow what many would consider “standard practice” for navigating the ups and downs of family life, but then again, his families are rarely standard to begin with.
Broker takes this idea a step further by starting its story at a “Korean baby box” – a literal hatch in a wall (usually of a church or other aid organization) where mothers can place their newborns when they are no longer willing or able to care for them with the assurance that they’ll be looked after and eventually adopted. These baby boxes are a real thing in Korea, and according to officials, they have saved the lives of thousands of babies. Kore-eda’s baby box, however, operates differently than most.
We come to learn that, on occasion, friends and church volunteers Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) steal the babies from the box before the church ever knows they’ve been dropped off, then sell them on the adoption black market. This seemingly vile tactic is not as unsavory as it seems, though, as Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo genuinely care for the children and are committed to pairing them with only the best potential families.
On one particular rainy night, a desperate young mother named So-young (Lee Ji-eun) leaves her newborn son Woo-sung at the box, only to regret her decision the next day. Rather than ask for the child back, though, she insists on accompanying Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo as they travel to meet with a potential family for little Woo-sung. Unbeknownst to anyone, two police detectives (played by Bae Doona and Lee Joo-young) have been on to the pair’s activities for some time and have been tailing them in order to catch them in the act of selling a baby.
In what could easily be a very grim tale in the hands of a less talented or less imaginative filmmaker, Broker subverts expectations at every turn by slowly but masterfully revealing the circumstances that put everyone on the path they’ve found themselves on. As Kore-eda has demonstrated many times before, virtue is in the eye of the beholder, and what some may consider unethical, others see as a saving grace. Legality and morality are not mutually exclusive, and Broker blurs the line between the two with the kind of heart and soul that very few directors can successfully pull off.
As the road trip lengthens and the entourage grows, the detectives become increasingly confused by what they are witnessing. While technically human traffickers, Sang-hyeon, Dong-soo, and So-young – not to mention the potential parents they interview – are atypical of the sort of criminals one would normally associate with the practice. The affection they lavish on Woo-sung surprises them, and eventually alters the way they perceive their quarry and themselves.
With each emotional revelation and humorous exchange, Kore-eda and Broker broadens the meaning of the word “family” to include a wide range of characters whose goodness far outweighs their questionable actions. Kore-eda once again proves himself a champion of human observation, capable of drilling down to the core of a character so that we may see them for who they truly are and not what a sanctimonious society would have us believe they are. Not everybody gets to choose their family, but with a bit of attentiveness and some luck, the one you truly need may present itself to you when you least expect it.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.