‘Broker’ – Hirokazu Koreeda
Rightfully compared to the elegance of such filmmakers as Yasujirô Ozu and Mikio Naruse, Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda came to popular attention following his Palme d’Or win for the 2018 marvel Shoplifters. The culmination of a blossoming early career that included such seminal films as 1995s Maborosi and 2008s Still Walking, Shoplifters was a charming and emotionally nuanced drama that paves the way for his most recent release Broker, a light crime flick that bottles the same essence without the knockout potency.
Retreading familiar territory, Koreeda’s latest movie once again follows a pack of social outsiders, akin to a number of his previous films, with a pair of illegal child traffickers being the subject of Broker. Ha Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) is something of a low-key career criminal, profiting off the sale of unwanted babies left at a drop-off box at a local church, a surprising real-life service that exists across the world. Working alongside a part-time employee of the church, Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), the pair see little moral issue with profiting at the hands of a human life.
Going about their scheme as usual, the duo prepare to sell yet another baby when its mother, Moon So-young (Ji-eun Lee), makes a surprising return, requesting to see where and in whose hands her offspring ends up. This sparks an unlikely road trip, whereupon the group search for suitable parents whilst being pursued by a pair of police officers who are trying to bring an end to their crimes.
Under different stewardship, Broker could feel like something of a dark, intense drama, with the baby ‘brokers’ being cartoon villains with pointy beards and rotten teeth, yet Koreeda steers the ship away from this, creating something rather sweet and fantastical in the process. It is indeed nice to think that child traffickers exist who are actually trying to ‘do the right thing’, but it also feels a little idealistic and, dare we say, a little Disney.
Of course, Koreeda possesses far more cinematic flair and emotional nuance than the cliche of Disney sentimentality, but there’s no denying that the Japanese storyteller has a tendency to slip into a trend of whimsical self-interest. The best of his films manage to strike a fine balance, with 2011s I Wish and 2013s Like Father, Like Son being great examples, and whilst Broker is largely an emotional triumph, it flirts with saccharine schmaltz a little too dangerously.
It is the work of leading cast members Gang Dong-won, K-Pop star Ji-eun Lee and the Cannes ‘Best Actor’ winner Song Kang-ho who pin the film down into some sort of tangible reality, with the chemistry between each lead character, old and young, being the film’s strongest hand. These abandoned characters are social off-cuts, cast out by others who have no use for them, with their defiant unification providing for a powerful narrative statement.
What hasn’t been lost is Koreeda’s deft ability to capture life at its most poetic and most curious, seizing the precise nuances of an individual’s emotions with masterful cinematic manoeuvring without the need for cloying dialogue. It is in small moments of earnest joy when the rag-tag family experience a day out at the amusement park or an open-windowed car wash ride where the filmmaker’s skills are effortlessly flexed. Broker is full of such moments but does little to innovate further, perfectly slotting into the middling area of Koreeda’s impressive filmography.
