Teenage prostitutes, abandoned babies, human traffickers and murderous gangsters: on the face of it, Broker could be one more piece of ghastly news reportage. Instead this might well be the most charming, heartwarming and humane film you see this year, another small marvel from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who, following 2018’s sublime Shoplifters, is emerging as modern cinema’s poet laureate of patchwork, improvised families.
A young woman, So-young (sometime K-pop queen Lee Ji-eun aka IU) leaves her newborn at a Busan church by a box for abandoned babies. It is received by a church volunteer, who wipes the CCTV and takes the infant to his friend Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho, the beloved patriarch from Parasite). Together they plan to sell the child to wealthy couples unable to legally adopt. However, the mother returns and, discovering their scheme, wants a share of any fee. As the three set off to meet prospective parents, they’re tailed by two detectives investigating human trafficking…
Kore-eda has declared an affinity for the films of Ken Loach, but there’s something of Bill Forsyth to this tale of lonesome misfits falling together into a roadtrip family. It’s a Renoir-ish human comedy where everyone has their reasons: from the original kidnapper, who was abandoned by his own mother, to the moralising cop, frustrated in her attempts to start a family, to Kang-ho’s crumpled launderette owner, forlornly trying to keep in touch with his estranged daughter.
The law, the Church, gangland and financial desperation all threaten to sunder their precarious sanctuary, and the story risks outright sentimentality, but Kore-eda maintains a miraculous balance and lands on a beautifully judged resolution. In a film full of people striving to escape their loneliness, a special mention for Bae Doona’s stoical cop, holding up her phone as Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” plays from a shopfront so her partner might hear and recall a fleeting moment of peace they found at the cinema, watching Magnolia together. Broker casts a similar spell.