Broker: Film Review
Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda only came onto my radar with his 2018 Palme d’Or-winning movie Shoplifters and I very much enjoyed his 2019 follow-up, French drama The Truth. Broker, a South Korean movie, makes it three for three in my eyes (I need to go back and watch his previous work).
Broker stars Parasite’s Song Kang Ho as Sang-hyun, who runs a laundry shop, and Peninsula’s Gang Dong Won as Dong-soo, who works at a church which runs a baby box service. Baby boxes, which are a real thing in South Korea, allow parents to drop off their children for adoption anonymously. Together, Sang-hyun and Dong-soo run an illegal business in which they steal some of the babies left in the box and sell them on the adoption black market.
One day, they decide to take Woo-sung after the newborn boy is left by his young mother So-young (Lee Ji Eun), but she returns to the church the next day and rumbles their plan. Instead of grassing them up, So-young decides to go with them on a road trip to interview the baby’s new parents. However, the police are already aware of this illegal business and two detectives – Su-jin (Doona Bae) and Lee (Lee Joo Young) – are on their tail.
Broker depicts the group’s unusual and unexpected journey with lots of heart and plenty of humour, with Hae-jin (Im Seung-Soo) providing a lot of laughs as a young stowaway who joins the road trip. The five outcasts come together to form an unconventional family (to put it mildly) and it was delightful watching them bond and develop trust despite what they’re planning to do.
It was also interesting how Kore-eda (who also wrote the script) flipped who the ‘broker’ of the story was as the film progressed. In the beginning, it’s clearly Sang-hyun and Dong-soo, but as their friendship with So-young deepens, they become less hellbent on selling her baby than Su-jin, who desperately needs to catch them in the act to arrest them and shut their business down.
However, the movie is a bit too gentle for its own good at times and I started to lose focus. It needed a bit more energy and momentum. The road trip is the best part of the movie, so it lost me a little bit towards the end once it was over. In addition, the epilogue features a voiceover explaining how it all wrapped up quite quickly and I couldn’t really process all that information so fast.
Broker isn’t perfect but the concept and the performances are excellent. I never knew baby boxes existed so I’m grateful to this film for shining a light on such a thought-provoking practice.
In cinemas from Friday 24th February