Broker is a brief glimpse of humanity balancing between abandonment and familial appreciation...
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring: Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, Bae Doona
Running time: 129 minutes
Highly praised at the 2022 Cannes film festival, and swift success at the box office, Broker is an emotional drama that gently dissects the complexity of human connection through the cradle of an unorthodox, found family.
The film begins within the bleak, dark rainy exterior of a church. With a disheveled, young girl abandoning her newborn baby outside with a note promising her return. And this promise is fulfilled - but not without difficult deliberation. Remaining persistent that the safest option for her baby son, Woo-Sung, is to be completely detached from her care, So-young and two church based "brokers" go on an emotional excursion around Korea, using the black market as a means to interview potential parents. From the onset the maternal instinct of the woman is mystified.
For a myriad of different reasons our widespread cultural belief is that women are born with a certain psycho-maternalism built in them. Something that, even whilst laying dormant, is always available in a mystical reserve if children are suddenly in need of care. In multiple press releases for Broker, director Kore-eda makes it clear he believes this not to necessarily be the case. And thus his aim, with such an emotionally abrasive starting point, seems to be to dissect this accepted cultural belief. For men, paternalism is something cultivated over time. Something that strengthens with age. This typically male journey of parenthood is one we get to view from the maternal standpoint — as we watch So-young reject and accept the complications of motherhood.
Mothers manifest themselves in many different ways, but it is safe to say sensitivity and sacrifice are two words synonymous with the stereotypical experience of motherhood. So, for So-young to have a repeated aversion to sacrifice, to entangle herself up in the repeated dismissal of her own sensitivity and connection to her baby, opens the space on screen to tackle what constitutes the "correct" mother and how much support she should, and can be granted from those around her.
Broker employs such a sentimental, slow style of cinematography that the real substance of the film can be found in its quietness
Simone De Beauvoir, often attributed as the spearhead of second-wave feminism once wrote; "Pregnancy, above all, is a drama playing out in the woman between her and herself. She experiences it both as an enrichment and a mutilation." So-young’s character is the very expression of this. Handled with extreme emotional delicacy, we watch as she battles with the enrichment of mother-baby bonding and the eventual spiritual "mutilation" when she is reminded that these nourishing moments are purely fleeting.
And it is these reminders that arrive in the form of two female detectives covertly following So-young and her broker comrades — attempting to corroborate their legal claims that both broker’s are involved in the process of illegal baby selling. But even these two women are part of Kore-eda’s examination on motherhood — with their own feelings of guilt, empathy and maternalism woven into the fabric of the plot.
In tandem with a film's substance is its style. Broker employs such a sentimental, slow style of cinematography that the real substance of the film can be found in its quietness. It is not the long driving escapade or the tumultuous emotional revelations that sustain this film, but rather the reflective moments: the messy hotel rooms full of baby toys, fruit boxes left on the dashboards, tired eyes and dishevelled clothing. All of these elements coalescing to balance out the darkness of the plot with a sense of aesthetic humanism.
As a style of filmmaking Broker is particularly interesting, simultaneously scattered and compact; the aesthetic paradox coinciding with the ethical paradox. That is, the slow, steadiness of the settings, in its gentle change of the seasons, its continual rainfall that seeks only to soothe, and the comfortable confines of a family, cross-country car placed in direct aesthetic contrast with the subject matter of child trafficking. It should be a visually and morally jarring clash, but Kore-eda uses the aesthetics as a playground that quiets and calms the ethical paradox of motherhood versus abandonment.
The film is wrapped up in a typically bittersweet sentimentality that comes so effortlessly to the films of Kore-eda. And this two hour gentle restoration of a family unit that transcends past emotional expectation and societal orthodoxy is the perfect, emotionally delicate found-family feature.
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