Review: BROKER

A woman leaves a baby outside an orphanage. It's wrapped in swaddling but the night is cold and wet. She has not used the pull out baby box in the wall. She leaves a note and flees the scene. She is being watched by two women police officers, one of whom puts the baby in the box where it is a lot safer, while the other follows the woman who left the infant. On the other side of this, and later, an employee of the orphanage and an older friend decide to sell the baby to a worthy couple and catch up with the mother to pay her the money. The mother, wracked by guilt returns to the orphanage the next day, sees what's going on and insists on tagging along to ensure the match is a good one. As the best buyer candidate is out of town this transaction turns into a road trip with those cops in pursuit and a local mafia murder investigation under way. The term road trip might have done it for most of you, of course everyone will get philosophical on the way and the hardest heart will soften and the most resistant spirit will grow. Are you right? Well, yes and no.

There is a scene toward the end that should be sculpted from the finest cheese. Two of these characters are on a Ferris Wheel. As they ascend, one of them waxes romantic with pledges of self sacrifice and acceptance while the other sadly absorbs. Then on the way back down to earth, the language is plainer and outlook more realistic as the consequences are talked over. But the scene's placing is perfect, the characters have developed so much, their friction tempered by having to think about the tiny life at the centre of the drama, the pressure surrounding them from the law, the mob and their own inadequacies. The high-minded pleas are more like full formed wishes, finished with a poet's eye for leanness. The return of earthly concerns as plain but no less poetic. It is essential that we know that the dreaming has been in earnest and is now something as tangible as the rail of the wheel's cabin, limiting but protecting.

This is a Kore-eda film. Hirokazu Kore-eda has been plugging away at cinema audiences with his natural feeling blends of warmth, humour and dark themes for decades. He has uprooted himself in this case from his native Japan to shoot in South Korea with a cast led by Parasite's Song Kang-ho and a small treasure trove of local acting prowess. He brings his pallet colliding pastels and candlelight, a spare orchestral score and an atmosphere that binds the many delicate stations of the story to each other. If you aren't familiar with Kore-eda's films, think Ken Loach but with a lot more heart.

Beginning as a modern urban fable about abandonment and responsibility Broker (Ha Sang-hyun and Dong-soo are cynically dubbed brokers by the returning mother) becomes an epic transformation through acceptance and belonging. But the shackles of the law and the tightly knotted ethical questions never get smoothed over. That they are expressed in what mostly sound like everyday conversation belies the craft applied to them. The child has a number of metaphorical hooks and lines in him from a sphere of influences, all of whom want him for widely varying motives and we are at no time permitted to forget the act that set this tale in motion and how it can never quite resolve. Each character has a take on what has happened and what might and that ranges from poignant to ugly and it reminded me of how Hieronymous Bosch's painting of Christ Carrying the Cross is composed of faces in space, crowding around the central figure, each bearing an individual expression from the snaggle toothed monk's glee to the peace of St Veronica holding her cloth with Christ's image. You don't have to be slightly religious (I'm not even slightly religious) to be slapped in the face by the picture and the power it derives from the multiplicity of characters. All you have to do is look. That's the way Kore-eda works, too.