• Baby Broker (ベイビーブローカー)

7/23/22 (Sat)

Koreeda Hirokazu’s latest offering, filmed in Korean, is a reexamination of themes on the notion of family that he explored to such great effect in Shoplifters. (The actual English name appears to be simply Broker, which may also be an attempt to play on the word’s meaning of poor. But that’s a terrible title, so I’ve gone with the Japanese, which uses the English wording.) It involves a “baby box”, a place set up at churches or hospitals allowing women to drop off unwanted newborns safely and anonymously. The concept was developed in Japan but has not taken real hold – only one box exists in the entire country, and only a bit over 100 children have been left there since it opened in 2007. (The situation wasn’t helped by a scandal soon upon opening when one father left a three-year-old boy, prompting censure from the prime minister.) It proved much more popular in Korea, where thousands of women have taken advantage of it, leaving the facility to find adoptive homes or orphanages for the toddlers. That situation could reflect the greater spread of Catholicism in Korea, which might put greater psychological pressure on women having to choose between abortion and abandonment. In any case, I had assumed that this was the reason the director chose to set the film in Pusan rather than Japan, but it turns out that he mainly wanted to work with Song Kang-ho, the actor best known for Parasite. Which, it turns out, is a good reason.

A man working at a church baby box is in cahoots with a struggling Laundromat owner who brokers some of the infants to families who don’t want to go through the arduous official adoption process, the men justifying their actions as giving the children a future. They have begun a deal on one kid when the mother reenters the picture, not to reclaim the infant but to ensure that he is treated right. The trio embark on a road trip to deliver the child to the purchasers. They acquire another member when they discover that a soccer-loving school-age child from an orphanage, himself a baby box kid, has stowed away in their car. Their evolving relationship creates its own family of sorts. At the same time, they are being trailed by the police, who are just waiting to catch them in the act. Little do the brokers know that the police have planted a spy in their little family.

Subsequent events roll out in unexpected if not always credible ways. On the positive side, the main characters are not painted as outright evil. The men show feelings for the infant, and their interaction with the stowaway suggest that they might have become good parents with normal lives under different circumstances. They even reject one highly lucrative offer when they judge the parents to be unqualified (fortunately for them – the deal was a setup by the police). The mother is neither an unfeeling woman nor a pitiful waif; we learn that she has murdered her married lover, the ruthless gangster who fathered the child, and claims to be abandoning the infant to avoid tainting him with the sins of his parents. The policewoman also has issues that make the chase personal to her. The film has a few too many plot strands what with murders, mobsters, betrayal, marriage issues and more, muddying the message, and it leans toward the melodramatic in a rather un-Koreeda manner. Still, it flows smoothly throughout, offering several moving moments. There is one particularly memorable sequence on a Ferris wheel, showing the broker and boy in one car and the baby box worker and mother in the other.

At the same time, Koreeda makes some curious choices. At the very start, the mother has taken the trouble to bring her newborn to the baby box but, rather than placing him comfortably inside, lays him on the ground outside. What is that all about? That may be visually interesting but isn’t remotely believable. It is left to the policewoman, who has been spying on the facility, to get out and put the child gently in the box once the mother is gone. That sequence is unnecessary. At the other end of the film, we find that the policewoman herself has taken care of the child for three years before passing him on to someone else. It simply doesn’t ring true that she would be so willing to give up a child after raising him from infancy, especially having established that she has no kids of her own, and she can’t possibly think that it’s in the interest of the child himself given that she’s the only mother he’s ever known. It repeats the worst sin from Koreeda’s irritating Like Father, Like Son, sacrificing human nature for what may seem a cool plot point. There is also a confusing coda involving the disappearance of one of the main characters as well as the reported murder of a gangster who had been trying to retrieve the child for the biological father’s widow (it’s complicated). Such touches, and there are others throughout, feel like a movie plot rather than natural developments, as if Koreeda were auditioning for a Netflix series. He would benefit from a dramaturge. A disappointment given the story’s promise.

The acting is stellar all around. Song Kang-ho justifies Koreeda’s faith in him with a strong performance as the older broker that earned him a Best Actor award at Cannes. My favorite moment is the heartbreaking scene where his young daughter from a former marriage tells him that she can’t see him anymore, leaving him with a stuffed animal that he presumably intended to give her. Great acting. His younger cohort, Gang Dong-won, provides solid support, and Bae Doona, who has worked with Koreeda before, is excellent as the policewoman. But the standout is Lee Ji-eun in the multifaceted role of the mother with a past. She maintains a tough exterior while ably suggesting her complicated mental state at the choices she makes along the way. Koreeda again demonstrated his talent with child actors with Im Seung-soo as the stowaway child, nicely avoiding the cutesies.

The film is clearly aspiring to the level of Shoplifters in its depiction of an almost-family among the working poor, but falls well short of that masterwork due to undue plot and character developments. Still, it’s entertaining throughout, and there’s something to be said for that.