In a sequence in his 1999 masterwork “Magnolia,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s network of lonely people sings subtly at first and then unexpectedly. Aimee Mann’s wrenching song “Wise Up” is being mouthed as Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Tom Cruise, John C. Reilly, and everyone else stare out into the darkness and attempt to make sense of their hopeless lives.
The sequence appears out of nowhere, but it is just something that happens, like so many of the best portions of that movie and all the best movies. You follow it.
In the complicated and melancholy family drama “Broker” by Hirokazu Kore-eda, policewoman Su-(Doona jin’s Bae) automobile is listening to “Wise Up” on the radio on a rainy evening. This lonely cop, who is trying to call her own estranged loved one, makes small talk about the scene in the movie and admits that “it doesn’t really make sense” as she waits for her job to finally provide her with the closure she needs from her own past demons.
Mann’s voice is instantly recognizable. Although “Broker” makes sense, this touching tribute to one of cinema’s most heartbreaking depictions of the breakdown of family systems and the extraordinary lengths humans go to forgive, grow, heal, and fall in love makes everything come together nicely.
When Kore-eda returns to Cannes after winning the Palme d’Or for the magnificent “Shoplifters” with a narrative that deals with essentially the same psychological and emotional reckonings, it’s not exactly unexplored territory. Long live the new clan, long live the nuclear family.
“Broker” follows a couple of child traffickers who take a runaway young mother under their wing and set out on the road to sell her baby for the best price while learning how to forgive their parents and learn from our children as they deconstruct and lovingly redefine the meaning of family once more. Whereas Kore-previous eda’s film found tenderness in a ragtag gang of thieves learning how to take care of each other as they rob everyone else, “Broker” follows.
How this idea is carried out is somehow magical in its sensitivity, raising concerns about morality, free will, financial decision-making, murder, family, and how to find love among all this terrible chaos.
No solutions are offered since Kore-eda while being an empath, has never believed in utopia and hardly ever in an unbelievable happy ending. There is amazing patience for all the unusual travels you have to take to get rid of the bitterness passed down through the centuries, as well as an extraordinary sympathy for the terrible judgments we make.
And the director always finds a way to see the positive side of everything. Narratively, it’s “Little Miss Sunshine” crossed with “Juno,” but there’s so much more to it than that, and no other director could balance the difficult moral dilemmas that shape the movie quite like Hirokazu Kore-eda.
Woo-sung has never been in better company with these actors as “Parasite” patriarch Song Kang-ho heads the baby boxing operation as trafficker Sang-Hyeon, a middle-aged man who can’t figure out the laundromat he claims he owns but clearly knows what Woo-sung, the son of young mother So-young (K-Pop star Lee Ji Eun, better known as IU, a welcome wonder with a layered.
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Sang-Hyeon works with Dong-soo, a well-meaning young man with a chip on his shoulder who was abandoned as a child despite his mother’s assurances that “she’d come back,” played by Gang Dong-won, who is frequently charming behind his anger. One out of every 40 people who say that never does, he tells So-young.
Similar to “Shoplifters,” “Broker” has an astounding amount of unusual characters who say and do outrageously unexpected things, which contributes to much of its charm.
Sang-gang Hyeon meets little seven-year-old Hae-jin, a football-crazy kid who assures everyone he’ll be just like Tottenham Hotspurs’ Son Heung-min one day, after a quick trip to the orphanage to scout out a potential family for Woo-sung (planted by Su-jin and her colleague Lee, giving the game away with inadequate knowledge about fertility treatments).
The next thing you know, Hae-jin has snuck into the van with the rest of the group, rating possible purchasers and attempting to determine what types of men So-young could be drawn to become just like them.
He and the others can make moral quandaries seem as clear as to whether or not you should carry an umbrella when a downpour is approaching. If you can’t rear a child, why even have one? Is it less sinful to murder him before he is born? Can you ever get over the person who abandoned you? Should welfare take action? The police? How about the lady herself? No matter which path you take, it’s an impossible, never-ending cycle that forces women into painful and judgmental circumstances.
Although it’s important to keep in mind that abortion was just decriminalized by a 2019 order of the Constitutional Court of Korea, that would be to completely miss the point and misunderstand Kore-eda. A cursory reading might unnervingly suggest a light anti-choice leaning. No decision is ever entirely the right one, and the “Broker” is aware that what matters is the course you pursue after deciding to leave.
When it comes to family, a lot of things don’t make sense: the way you’re sort of stuck with the people who brought you into the world, the distance you feel between your parents and the people you want to become.
Everyone is making every effort to sort through those options, to use a crime as a means of redemption, and to find a home for a child who won’t even understand the implications of having the ability to choose until it’s too late.
These are subtle existential tensions that Kore-eda has always been interested in (and will probably continue to be for as long as the fight for bodily autonomy persists), and “Broker” represents something of an emotional and intellectual high point. It’s one of the master’s most open and courageous films in terms of discussions on what parents, and notably women, can or should do for themselves and the children to whom they are shackled for life.
Call it murder, a crime against humanity, a case of insanity, and put them both in jail. But despite everything, you may find a way to feel your heart become a little lighter, to forgive and develop, and to have faith that your family will eventually find its way back.
“Broker” made its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
