Thoughts on Broker

    Last week on Hulu, I watched Broker, a 2022 South Korean drama directed by Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Nobody Knows, Air Doll). It shares similar themes with Shoplifters, as both films are about unconventional families of criminals and misfits, but manages to stand out as its own world, especially being South Korean and not Japanese. It features a cast of major film stars, like Song Kang-ho (The Host, Parasite, Snowpiercer), Bae Doona (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Air Doll, Cloud Atlas), and Lee Ji-eun, aka IU (famed South Korean pop star and actress). It's a really interesting film about mothers, adoption, and feeling rejected by society and being outcasts.

    The film stars Song Kang-ho as Ha Sang-yeon, who owns a laundry service and volunteers at the church, where his friend Dong-soo (Gang Dong-wong) works. They together run a illegal business where they steal babies that are placed in the baby box by anonymous mothers for adoption, selling them on the black market to couples, acting as brokers. They take a baby that a young woman, Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun), had abandoned, only for her to return and want her child back. It's more complicated, as she not only gave up her child, and they already are in the process of contacting couples, but she had been a sex worker, and in a difficult relationship with the child's father. So she goes with the brokers to interview potential couples, traveling around in a van, along with a runaway orphan boy, to size up whether they would be good parents. Plus, two detectives, Soo-jin (Bae Doona) and Lee (Lee Joo-young) are on the brokers' trail, waiting to catch them in the act of a selling exchange to arrest them for child trafficking, and want to use So-young as an informant to reduce her sentence.

   It's been a week since I've seen it, so I may not remember a lot of it to highlight, but I liked that it had a melancholic feel to it, of a drama that felt sad but not depressing, and giving a three-dimensional portrait of people who are doing black market activities that are wrong for the child, but understandable for their difficult situations. And that the detectives were an interesting pair, between the veteran and the younger rookie, who were sympathetic to the trio even if they still had to bust them on trafficking charges. It was a thoughtful and interesting film to watch, and I've liked Kore-eda's quiet humanistic dramas for a long time.