Broker movie review: An unconvincing mix of great craft and implausible ideas

In a scene from Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker, a man tries to intimidate two benevolent child traffickers. While one locks himself inside his car, the other one, partially asphyxiates the aggressor to knock him out cold, on the pavement outside. It’s a fairly simple sequence, that is allotted a degree of poeticism by how it is framed. We see the one who shies away from the quarrel rather than the one who embodies some sort of gruff, mechanical resistance. It’s in essence, the perspective that the film is trying to convince you with. Shot in Korea, the film follows Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo, two small-time, mostly harmless hustlers, who lift children out of boxes placed outside local churches so they can sell them to desperate parents, sans the bureaucracy of due process. It’s an abrasive, near ludicrous idea, but Kore-eda almost, makes it work.

Sang-hyeon, played by the reliably charming Song Kang-Ho, is partners with Dong-soo (Gang Dong-Won) in an oddly benevolent little racket they run and survive on. Steeped in debt and under the cosh, these two men steal unwanted newborns left by unprepared mothers from boxes, that are apparently regular fixtures at Korean churches. They don’t exactly sell these urchins at grimy, ungainly sweatshops but instead sell them for good money to parents who’d rather not go through the hassle of the paperwork. It’s a hard sell, this cynical little mission for good, and despite the best efforts of the committed actors, it can often feel like a over sophisticated chore. Legal adoption, surely, can’t be as nefariously difficult to pull off, so as to send desperate parents looking for black market deals.

Both Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo evidently, love children, which is all the stranger because it possibly takes a certain degree of devilishness to be in the peculiar business that they operate in. In one scene, Sang, tells a couple rather blatantly “Look at him, his face has no spots”. It’s almost as if he is trying to sell a washing machine, but the absurdity of it is never quite captured. Kore-ada’s previous film Shoplifters was an equally giddy if the understated portrayal of a family-accommodating small crimes, but here the bucket seems to have been pushed a little beyond redemption.

Things in Broker become interesting when So-young, the mother of a child the two have lifted, confronts them. The three, rather oddly, set off on a journey to give away her child. And while that awkward collaboration gives way to some truly spectacular moments, the idea that the three can somehow band together without ever really questioning the morality of it all, feels, jarring if not implausible. Kore-ada is still a master of extracting stunning moments out of the minimalism of everyday chores. In one scene here, a potential buyer wishes to breastfeed the child being considered, to see if she will accept her. It’s quietly torturous to witness the three react differently to the request.

This little operation is also being tracked by agents of the local police, which intrigues as a segue but never quite coalesces into the main narrative of an unlikely friendship. Rather than make this about a bizarre little communion of amateurs being sized by the police, it might have been better to let the three friends carry on to discover the fault lines on their own. Their innocence, as a bunch of clueless rogues who stumbled upon a kid and wished upon the world nothing better than to transport him or her for money, doesn’t quite play off of the sobriety of the police. In fact, it’s the law that looks and sounds harsh, and possibly unjust. And while that has echoes of the difficult righteousness that punctuated Kore-ada’s Shoplifters, here it just rings hollow and unsound.

Kore-ada, obviously hasn’t lost his craft and neither have the actors. Song Kang-Ho has the kind of screen presence that can even transform the dreary gut-wrenching world of child trafficking, into a quirky little fisticuff between man and manhood. He hides from conflict and confrontation, while gently rearing children and also objectifying them effortlessly. In another script, he would be a sociopath, but part of Kang-Ho’s faultless charm is his ability to go from kindness to killer within moments. He is never not arresting to look at. Unfortunately, the plot doesn’t help him and stakes ideas far too ludicrous and gangly, it sticks out like a sore limb that simply won’t hide. It’s clear Kore-ada is obsessed with humanising criminals, but here he gives himself far too much to do.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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