A review op the 2022 Korean film “Broker”
I admired and enjoyed the 2018 Japanese film “Shoplifters” which was written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. In this 2020 work – which again he both writes and directs – he switches both location and language to South Korea, although he reprises some familiar themes.The core of this story is the notion of a ‘baby hatch’, a place where new mothers who do not want to bring up their baby cam leave them for care in an orphanage, a practice which exists in Japan but more commonly in Korea. A worker at the church where the baby is left, a black marketeer, and the child’s mother form an unlikely team to travel round the country looking for a couple to whom to sell the baby, all the time trailed by two female cops hoping for an arrest.
Like “Shoplifters”, Kore-eda does not make moral judgements and shows the gradual formation of an unconventional ‘family’ so that, despite the subject matter, there is some humour along the way and an uplifting ending.