Hirokazu Koreeda’s
Broker tells the story of what happens when a young woman who left her baby at a Busan church baby box returns and discovers there’s no record of the child. She ends up on an improvised road trip across South Korea with two traffickers who act as brokers to place infants with wannabe parents, doggedly pursued by a couple of detectives who are also making things up on the hoof as they try to secure an arrest.
The setup may be unusual, but what is more unexpected is the moral tone. The only innocent in the entire film is the baby at the heart of the story. Everyone else’s motives are at best dubious, but, more realistically, quite sinister. Yet there are no villains.
Director/screen-writer Koreeda goes out of his way to emphasise the benevolence of the two traffickers who are portrayed in a rather ‘hail fellow well met’ manner. A bent copper is never in doubt of her redemption. The greatest judgement is meted out on potential adoptive parents who are criticised for their aesthetic demands offspring when it comes to a baby’s looks. The film’s conclusion attempts to wrap up everyone’s lives – and the consequences of their actions – with a brightly coloured bow. No one pays much of a price for their actions, except the countless, unseen children who have been taken out of the reach of state protection and sold on the black market.
This is no coming-of-age road trip of self-discovery. In some ways, Broker is like an enormous fantasy satire: a feel-good send-up of child trafficking. Yet the dialogue and editing never suggests that it’s being done in a knowing way. Much of the film could also function as a giant tourism advert for the lush coastal scenery the motley crew drive through, though the opening minutes with torrential rain flooding the concrete steps through a residential area bring back memories of Parasite. That film’s Del Boy patriarch Song Kang-ho is the dry-cleaning, church-volunteer, baby-trafficking father figure in Broker. (Though his ability to lock up his business and cut off his customers from their laundry stretches credulity.)
Lee Ji-eun (the singer-songwriter who performs using the stage name IU) captures the complexity of the young mother: childlike in her interactions with a runaway kid the posse pick up along the way; world weary and abrupt when faced with irritating adults. Dramaturgically,
Broker is a wild success. The gradual revelation of the mother’s backstory is superbly judged.
Of course, the moral ambiguity – or total absence – doesn’t make Broker a bad film. It’s so well-crafted that you can drift in and out of just enjoying the action before mentally jerking upright and starting once more to analyse the subtext of what’s going on. Audience opinions will no doubt be divided: let me know what you think in the comments!
Broker is being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre until 2 March.
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