Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda has had a prolific career so far in his native Japan. He first rose to prominence with the movie After Life, becoming a staple in the international film festival circuits for his slice-of-life dramas focused on families, and recently rose to even more acclaim with the release of his films like After the Storm and Like Father, Like Son. In 2018, his tender and heart-warming movie Shoplifters took home the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, ultimately being nominated for several big Western awards like the BAFTA Awards, Oscars, and Golden Globes. However, in 2022, Kore-eda returned with Broker, a movie set in South Korea with Korean actors — a bold departure from his previous work, which was exclusively set in Japan (except for 2019’s The Truth).
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In Broker, Song Kang-ho, Bae Doona, Lee Ji-eun (IU), and Gang Dong-won join forces to tell a story that could only be set in South Korea. Lee Ji-eun portrays a mother who abandons her baby at a church’s baby box. One of the workers at the church (Gang) and the owner of a laundry shop (Song) run an operation where they steal babies from the box and sell them to new parents. But when Lee’s character returns the next day to the church, she joins the two on a journey to find her son’s new parents. Along the way, Broker delves deep into the notions of what constitutes a family and love.
Making Something Out of Nothing
Zip Cinema
Each of the four main characters in Broker is gradually revealed to be alone in the world. Alone, in this context, is defined as the fact they do not have any immediate family to surround them. Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun), the woman who gives up her baby and joins the process of finding him a home, is alone in the world. Although she is questioned throughout the movie about her motives, there is one concrete fact about her: she was unable to provide for her child, saw no way out of the situation, and decided to give him away in an attempt to try and allow him the opportunity to have a better life. Throughout the movie, she acts like she does not care about other people, but it becomes increasingly obvious that she does, especially in her final act of redemption.
As it turns out, she is not the only one. Song Kang-ho’s character, Sang-hyeon, is scrambling to try and pay off his debts. His wife left him, taking their daughter with her, and moved to Seoul. His friend Dong-soo, who he runs his baby-selling business with, is in a similar boat. His mother abandoned him at the gate of the orphanage he was raised with a note promising that she would return for him. She never does. Hae-jin, a young boy from the same orphanage, hides in the back of the truck and joins the brokers on their journey to sell So-young’s child.
These characters, who all essentially have been left behind by their families and loved ones, find solace in each other during Broker. Dong-soo, in an emotional scene with So-young, confronts her about her actions. She, like his mother, left a note with her child saying that she would be back. She also did not plan to return — she admits that later in the film. That moment in the plot marks a pivotal turning point for So-young, as she begins to accept the brokers and situation. This doesn’t become a business deal anymore — the stakes are so much higher, and as one character suggests at one point, they should all just raise the child together instead of selling him. The money no longer matters, despite Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo needing it.
Healing Through Shared Experiences
The protagonists of Broker each come to the table with emotional baggage. Sang-hyeon’s got an ex-wife and gangsters coming after him for money, while So-young has the police following and waiting for the perfect moment to arrest her. At the end of Broker, one of the last scenes where everyone is allowed to be together is at the amusement park. Sang-hyeon, while under the pressure of lying to a cop, said he was going to take there and does just that. This is one of the few moments in the movie where the characters are briefly unbound by the sense of duty they have toward finding a buyer for the child.
As they ride on a Ferris wheel, Hae-jin wailing in fear about how he wants to return to the ground, it genuinely feels like they are a family. And perhaps this is what compels Bae Doona’s character, the policewoman Soo-jin, to finally break her mask of nonchalance and realize what has happened during these individuals’ time together. Despite all of the seriousness, there’s so much love and care in how the characters interact with each in the last act of the film. Although it seems impossible when they raise the question of raising the child together, it seems believable for a moment that they could do that.
Hirokazu Kore-eda has created a careful drama with Broker, one that does an excellent job of showing how found families can be chosen with the right circumstances. Whether it was the brokers, So-young, and Hae-jin traveling across the country to find the right parents for her child, or Soo-jin deciding that it was time to bring a kid into her life, there are a lot of layers to unpack when it comes to this movie depicts these kinds of families. But, by the movie’s end, it manages to create something magical out of a tragic situation that happens to a lot of mothers — baby boxes do exist in South Korea to this day.
