Kore-eda Hirokazu’s ‘Broker’

The​ meaning of the word ‘foundling’ seems pretty clear, but there is an interesting slippage in its implications. Such children are not lost and found, they are picked up after being left somewhere. Or thrown away, as the subtitles of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Broker keep reminding us. A middle-aged man – Ha Sang-hyun, played by Song Kang-ho – looks tenderly at a baby and asks: ‘How could anyone throw him away?’ This has been interpreted as a sentimental moment in a sentimental movie, and Kang-ho won the Best Actor award at Cannes for that tender look and others like it. But ‘sentimental’ doesn’t seem quite the right designation, since the man himself steals and sells children. The defence of the practice, by this man’s assistant (Dong-soo, played by Gang Dong-won), relies on cynical logic: ‘Someone threw him away, so we sell him.’ The word ‘broker’ comes up in this context too, when Sang-hyun tries to defend his enterprise as a form of benevolence. ‘You’re just brokers,’ a young woman says. This word in turn becomes more than a little problematic when a policewoman who is trying to set up a false sale in order to catch the criminals in the act admits gloomily: ‘We are more like brokers than they are.’ The slippage seems to be in play again. The brokers are their own clients; the police are arranging (ineptly) what they should be observing.

Baby boxes exist in quite a few countries, and have been much used in Korea since 2009. They are holes in a wall, safe deposits for children who are unwanted, or more precisely perhaps for children whose mothers cannot afford to want them, and the boxes are often maintained by Christian churches. There is no theft or sale here, just a questionable form of charity. But Kore-eda’s movie takes things in another direction. Sang-hyun, the owner of a laundry and repairs service, in debt to a Korean version of the mob but also a man who does good work at a local church, steals a child now and then from the church’s box, and erases all signs that the child was ever there. At the beginning of the film we see what seems to be a deposit by a young woman, accompanied by a note promising she’ll be back, with the baby placed on the ground beneath the box rather than in the box itself. Sang-hyun and Dong-soo scoff at the note. That, they agree, is what all these disappearing mothers say. Except this one does come back and catches them at their thievery.

The ambivalent depositor is Moon So-young, wonderfully played by Lee Ji-eun, who looks weirdly, gracefully calm considering how emphatic, even violent, some of her actions are. I assumed at first that she couldn’t be the mother and that there would be plot developments based on that twist – I was wrong.

Once So-young learns what is going on, she decides to stay around and collect her share of the cash when it arrives. It’s not clear why Sang-hyun and Dong-soo accept this, but perhaps they have no alternative. The three of them, plus the baby, set off on a long drive to meet a pair of potential buyers. There is some cruelly comic stuff with the baby’s eyebrows, which are not dense enough to be thought attractive, and Sang-hyun thinks that a touch-up with pencil might help. The buyers too are disappointed with the baby’s looks, especially the sketchy eyebrows, and ask whether the dealers have been using Photoshop. ‘He was cuter in the photo.’ They refuse to pay the price they had agreed with the brokers and offer less than half the amount. The dealers are baffled by this move but So-young steps up and swears at the buyers’ arrogance. They shouldn’t just feel free ‘to talk shit about someone’s baby’. This ends the meeting and the transaction is cancelled. The point of this chaotic scene seems to have nothing to do with crime or money or motherhood, and everything to do with a baby’s right to be a person and not an art object. On a second viewing, I noticed the policewomen in the corner of the frame watching the whole show, so the double brokerage, the law and its infringers, is even more consistently in place than I first thought.

For the rest of the movie, the trio are trying to sell the baby to the right people, and the two policewomen (played by Bae Doona and Lee Joo-young) spy on their every move and try out their own interventions. Oh, and the trio becomes a quartet when a boy from an orphanage decides to join the gang and travels everywhere with them. He is the one who opens the windows of the van while it is going through a car-wash, so that everyone is thoroughly soaked. They all think this is hilarious, though there is some worry about the baby catching a cold, and we begin to realise what is happening. This group has turned into a family, and the movie is having a spell as a version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

But then this is only part of the game the film is playing. It is too busy to settle down – too many new figures and plot elements are introduced, including a murder investigation, a plan devised by the dead man’s widow, flashback stories about foundlings and mothers – but its governing project is clear. While not wanting to tell us anything explicitly and diligently pretending to look the other way, it wants us to think a lot harder than we usually do about what it means to bear or bring up a child, and what a child may need to know or dream about its parents. In a wonderful scene, which I won’t describe in detail because I’d be giving too much away, the major issue becomes that of talking to children who are too young to understand speech of any kind. What do you say to them? Why say anything? Why does it matter? A partial answer is that other people may be listening who do understand, and another consideration is what we are ready or willing to say to ourselves, aloud or not. And, more important, there may be times when we need to pretend that children can understand. Fictions have lots of jobs to do.

At the beginning of the film it’s not at all clear that So-young knows why she has done what she’s done, and keeps doing. Her silence, though, and her use of her own still face as a kind of mask, may mean that she is secretive rather than bewildered. She is certainly angry, and unwilling to simplify or forgive her own mistakes or those of others. But she does come to understand one thing about what she was doing when she dumped the baby by the church, and it takes her beyond the shocked, conventional declarations the film reports: ‘How could she be a mother?’ ‘Can you understand a woman who throws away her baby?’

So-young believes she was, in part, trying both to preserve her baby’s life and to prevent him from having a mother like her. ‘He won’t have to live like me,’ she says late in the film – which is not the same idea, but not unrelated either. What I take to be the film’s reading of this mixture of truth and lies is that being a mother or a child or anyone is inseparable from the conceptions we have of those roles, and not reducible to those conceptions either. Think again. And then stop thinking.