What’s a new mom doing alone with a baby at a church in the middle of the night? Attached to the wall is a box with a little folding door, like the bin you’d use to return books at a library. The mom gently puts her baby on the ground. It’s clear from her face that she’s torn up inside, but she leaves the baby and walks away, while two cops in a parked car witness the whole thing.
This is the beginning of Broker, a movie about a hidden world of underground adoptions. Turns out, the church wasn’t empty. Two men also watched the whole thing on a computer. One tells the other to delete the security footage. And then they steal the baby.
The next day, the mom comes back, feeling guilty. She demands to know where the baby is, but no one knows what she’s talking about. One of the men from the night before, who works at the church as a cover, feels bad for her, and explains what happened. When the mom, Moon So-young, finds out about the scam—selling unwanted babies to parents who aren’t able to adopt legally—she wants in, and we’re introduced to the main characters of Broker: a sex-worker with a secret, a lonely launderer who owes money to a gang and sells abandoned orphans to adoptees who can’t legally be parents, (played by Song Kang-ho, famous for Parasite) his partner in brokering who was once an orphan himself, and a young boy who is himself an orphan and reaching an age where it’s becoming less and less likely that he will ever be adopted.
Broker (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2022)
There are also the two women police officers who are chasing the brokers. The cops need to catch the brokers in the act of selling the baby, or they won’t be able to get a conviction. The younger cop is more sympathetic to the criminals. As she plants listening devices and overhears their conversations, she starts to sympathize with their situation. The older cop, played by Bae Doona, (probably best known in North America for her role in Sense 8 and other Wachowski projects) is more by-the-book, and less forgiving of our main characters.
It’s a quiet, thoughtful movie with meditations on parenthood, responsibility, and abandonment. I definitely found it moving. In particular, a scene on a Ferris wheel where Dong-soo and Moon talk about the possibility of raising Moon’s baby themselves, which they ultimately agree isn’t realistic. The scene reminded me about an article about emotion words in other languages that have no equivalent in English. This scene is full of the German word sehnsucht (an intense desire for alternative states and realizations of life, even if they are unattainable). The other scene was when the characters are sharing a hotel room, with the lights out, and they take turns thanking each other for being born. It’s a surprisingly powerful scene that for me got to the root of existence, and humanity, and friendship and family. The film captured a universal loneliness and expressed it truthfully, depicting very honestly and tenderly a feeling of unresolved abandonment.
Broker (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2022)
This movie is similar in its theme and characters to the Japanese movie Shoplifters. That’s because they were both filmed by the same director, which is not something I realized when I first started watching, having already seen Shoplifters a few years ago. There are big differences between the movies, though, and Broker isn’t a copy or a remake. Both movies compliment each other well and could make for an interesting double feature, though they are both pretty emotionally heavy.
Broker is a quiet, subtle movie and a bit of a different flavour from my last review, but if you’re looking for a thoughtful bittersweet movie, maybe curl up with this one. It’s well worth the watch.
Watch the trailer for Broker:
You can find the original post here