Broker: South Korean Baby-for-Sale Tale Less Story than Series of Serio-comic Events

Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda often makes films about improvised families, outsiders and outlaws who cling together for survival against a violent world.

His latest, Broker, set in South Korea, comes four years after he won the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters. It’s about a couple of grifters who sell babies on the black market.

A mixture of social realism, melodrama, and road comedy, the two-hour-plus Broker isn’t Kore-eda’s best work. But it’s redeemed by the filmmaker’s signature deep empathy for his lonely characters.

Within the ensemble, there are a couple of internationally known Korean stars, including Parasite’s hangdog patriarch Song Kang-Ho as Sang-hyun, a middle-aged divorced dad with a dry-cleaning business.

Along with younger accomplice Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) who works at a church, he’s involved in the baby trafficking business to pay off gambling debts. There’s also the deadpan Doona Bae (Cloud Atlas, Sense8, The Host) as woman cop Su-jin.

One rainy night, young woman So-young (k-pop star IU, a.k.a. Lee Ji-eun) leaves a boy baby, Woo-sung, on the church steps outside of a “baby box,” a clothing drop-off in the wall of the church. She’s is observed by the detective Su-jin and her younger partner, Lee (Lee Joo-young), who are surveilling the church, rightfully surmising that it’s home to a baby-selling business.

Before they head off,  Su-jin picks the baby up and puts it in the box, out of the rain. 

Shortly after. Sang-hyun and Dong-soo recover the child from inside the baby box and erase a video tape showing it being dropped off. They take the baby to Song’s home before selling him for around $10,000 to would-be parents who can’t wait for a legal adoption.

But the next day, they run into a complication.

The mother, So-young, has had a change of heart. She returns to the church orphanage to reclaim her child, only to discover the facility has no record of the baby being dropped off. Dong-soo fears that she may go to the police and takes her to Sang-hyun’s home to reunite with her child. They come clean about their racket, framing it as a form of benevolence (“We’re like cherubs…”) that happens to also pay.

So-young decides to go with them, with the plan to find suitable parents for her baby, and to take a cut of the payment.

The three of them set off on a road trip, looking for prospective parents for Woo-sung, all the while being tailed by the two detectives.

As the story rolls on through crowded motel stays, and clandestine meetings with prospective parents, Kore-eda piles on the complications in a way that feels like a slo-mo screwball comedy. The two men and a young woman and a baby are soon joined by another  kid, the irrepressible Hae-jin (Im Seung-soo), a runaway from the same orphanage where Dong-soo was raised.

As the result of So-young’s troubled past, there are some gangster lackeys following them, trying to retrieve Woo-sung.  Meanwhile, the women detectives manage to secretly contact So-young. They promise her leniency for a crime she has committed, if she co-operates in convicting the two baby-sellers.  

By the end, Broker feels more progressively accumulated than carefully designed, though it shines in individual scenes where Kore-eda shows his characteristic light, empathetic touch when his characters are at their most vulnerable.

Stand-out moments include a Ferris-wheel ride where characters, in separate carriages, permit themselves to show their fearful and tender sides. Also, there’s a memorable night at a motel, where the improvised family settle down for the night, creating a kind of good-night prayer to the infant that has brought them together and who represents the future. 

Broker. Directed and written by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Starring Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, Doona Bae, Lee Ji-eun, Lee Joo-young. Now playing at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox and opening across Canada January 13.