Broker Review: A Humane, If Sentimental, Examination of a Chosen Family

Two financially struggling friends run a black-market business stealing infants from a church’s so-called “baby box” and sell them for adoption. One desperate young mother who leaves her baby in the box before returning to the scene learns of the illegal operation and becomes involved in the search for suitable parents for her child. Two detectives are on the trail of the two friends. Somehow, amid all that, a homicide is involved.

Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Broker, then, would seem to possess all the ingredients for a pitch-black thriller. The Japanese filmmaker’s work is marked by the kind of empathy and patience that might seem antithetical to a tale involving human traffickers, gangsters, and sex workers. But it can be fascinating in and of itself to see an artist as esteemed and reliable as Kore-eda stretch a bit, and that fascination is enough to hold one’s attention throughout Broker.

Part of that sense of an artist stretching is geographical in nature. Set in South Korea and featuring an all-Korean cast that includes such veterans as Song Kang-ho and Bae Doona, Broker is Kore-eda’s second film after his 2018 Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters to be made outside of his native Japan, the other being 2019’s France-set The Truth, starring Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, and Ethan Hawke. Even when he examined the malleability of facts in art in The Truth, though, he did it through the lens of family drama—a mode he poignantly explored in earlier films like Still Walking, Like Father, Like Son, and After the Storm.

And for all its genre elements, that’s also the case with Broker. The two friends, Sang-hyeon (Song) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), who run the black-market business come from broken families: Sang-hyeon is a divorcé, and Dong-soo was abandoned by his mother as a boy. They essentially become surrogate fathers to the young mother, So-young (Lee Ji-eun), a sex worker who can’t bear to bring her baby boy, Woo-sung (Park Ji-young), up in her crime-riddled world.

Together with an orphan, Hae-jin (Im Seung-soo), who ends up tagging along with the crew during their just-shy-of-quirky road trip to interview the baby’s potential parents, all five form a makeshift family unit not unlike the one in Shoplifters. A desire for familial warmth also quietly animates Soo-jin (Bae), the older detective who, along with Lee (Lee Joo-young), is tailing Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo, and who initially radiates judgmental contempt for So-young upon spotting her dropping her baby off at the church baby box.

“I guess I was the one who wanted to sell him the most,” Soo-jin admits to Lee late in the film, referring to her inner desire for Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo to succeed in selling Woo-sung. It’s the most heavy-handed line of dialogue in what is, for Kore-eda at least, a fairly heavy-handed film, somewhat lacking in the delicate subtleties that distinguish his earlier dramas. Even Broker’s reliance on genre conventions and incident is excessive, with Kore-eda teetering at the precipice of sensationalism while trying to maintain his usual serene aesthetic style.

Still, even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda’s customarily bracing humanism. His is a big-hearted vision that refuses to pigeonhole anyone as merely good or evil; even the female mobster who sends two of her lackeys to go after So-young is shown to have her reasons. Kore-eda’s cast also helps immensely in putting across the drama, with Song radiating paternal warmth even when his character is at his most manipulative, and Bae suggesting acres of yearning and regret underneath a hardened exterior.

Nor has the change in locale dulled Kore-eda’s visual sense: An image of So-young holding out her hand collecting stray raindrops while recounting a dream about rain washing away her past sins is one of the most rapturously expressive shots of his career. Broker sets no high-water mark for Kore-eda, but it’s still recognizably his, with all the beauties that implies.