Broker (2022)
Review of Broker / 브로커, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
This movie has been on my radar ever since it debuted at Cannes Film Festival, as Song Kang-ho took home the Best Actor Award at the film festival for his role in the movie.
I waited patiently, was kind of sad when it wasn’t at the New York Film Festival, and then waited for the theatrical release. I was very much expecting this to not come to any theaters near me, but a miracle happened and right before I was going to go away on vacation this had a matinee at my local theater.
I had to see it, especially considering I’m a fan of almost every actor in this the movie. Kore-eda casting a bunch of people from Korean dramas he binged watched over quarantine is the biggest mood of the decade in my opinion—what a legendary way to get half of this cast. Anyways, I was one of two people in the theater, and while the other woman was crying, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie.
Onwards with the review!
Broker goes along with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s themes of finding and choosing family, even if you’re on the outskirts of society.
At the beginning of the movie, Moon So-young (portrayed by IU) drops her baby off right outside of a baby box at a Catholic Church in the pouring rain. The scene of this is Busan, where she, as we’ll quickly come to learn, is a prostitute for hire.
She doesn’t put the baby inside of the box, which means he’ll die if no one catches him in time. Luckily for the baby, known as Woo-sung, two police officers are tailing Soo-young and the one, portrayed by Bae Doona, puts the baby in the box while the other tails So-young through the streets.
When Woo-young is inside of the baby box, we meet Dong-soo and Sang-hyeon, two men who take babies and sell them on the black market.
Dong-soo, the younger of the two, deletes the footage of the baby in the church’s records. He works part-time with the church to look after the babies dropped off there, but the two of them take babies when they get the chance to sell. Sang-hyeon brings Woo-sung home to the dry cleaning business he runs, while the two female police officers tail him in the middle of the night.
Their operation is to catch them selling the baby in the act, and, as it turns out later, they need to arrest So-young too because she murdered Woo-young’s father, a wealthy man who hired a prostitute, because he wanted her to get rid of the baby.
So-young comes back to the church to look for the baby, and Dong-soo leads her to Sang-hyeon’s business. Together, they all decide to venture out and find the right buyer for the kid, but before they head out on a long road trip—the rest of this movie is spent on the road meeting various buyers for the kid—Sang-hyeon is visited by a kid he knows.
The guy ran a restaurant with his mother but is now a gangster, and demands 50 million won (about the equivalent of 40,000 USD) from Sang-hyeon. Sang-hyeon tells him that he’ll get the money to him next week, but things don’t go as planned.
They hit the road. The first couple that wanted to buy Woo-sung doesn’t take a liking for appearance, claiming the kid was Photoshopped on the images online. So-young cusses them out because of it, and the other two realize they have a long journey ahead of them. Along the way to their next buyer, they make a pit stop at the orphanage Dong-soo grows up.
The role Dong-soo plays in this movie is to provide context to So-young as to the impacts of what she is doing. He could represent what Woo-sung could grow up to be like, as Dong-soo was abandoned by his mother with a note that said she’ll be back—So-young left a note with Woo-sung saying she would come back, but later in the movie she admits she never planned on coming for him.
One of the orphanage kids, Hae-jin, hides in their car and joins them on the journey. The two police officers are still tracking them, and even strike up a deal with So-young. She agrees to wear a microphone and get the baby sold so all of them can be arrested, but we begin to see the cracks of Bae Doona’s character.
She acts like a hardass, but actually is a softie. We see the most of that when she talks to the writer she meets up with. At the same time, the wife of the man So-young murdered sends the gangsters who came for Sang-hyeon earlier to collect the baby, which she now wants as her own.
The final part of this movie takes place in Seoul. I found one of the most satisfying scenes when they head to the amusement park and Hae-jin, who was named for the sea, talks about wanting to be in water while on the ferris wheel.
In another section, So-young and Dong-soo are having a seriously intimate conversation—one could imagine these two getting together if the circumstances were different—about what is next. So-young ends up turning herself in to the police to get a reduced sentence, Dong-soo is arrested, and Bae Doona’s character ends up adopting Woo-young.
Classic to Hirokazu, this is a movie about found families. There’s a lot of little things packed into the details and simplicity of the film. We learn that Sang-hyeon is someone searching for his own relationships, and at the very end it is implied that he never actually left them behind, just watches in the distance.
Dong-soo is a representation of what Woo-sung could become if left alone in the system, but because they all made a tight network together in their journey, sans So-young going off to do her own thing, his life will be changed. So-young herself kind of self-sabotages, too, as she denies to herself and those around her that she cares for all of them.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a Kore-eda film at the end of the day, and while I found it to be brilliantly acted, it was just tough to get through. I enjoyed the movie. I really did. But I truly wasn’t absorbed into the world he had made and I found myself checking my phone a couple of times because I wasn’t able to get sucked into the movie in the way I wanted to be.
There are some really gorgeous moments scattered throughout, and I think it deserves some of the praise I got, but it feels like an extension of Shoplifters that is mildly exhausted when it comes to the plot.
A lot of ethical questions are raised throughout, and the meaning of who exactly is the broker here shifts when the plot points change. I think give the movie a chance, for sure, but don’t come in with high expectations.
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