‘Broker’ is a misfit family road trip | Cannes movie review

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker is at once a heartwarming cheeky road-trip comedy and a heartbreaking drama of misunderstood misfits that continues his exploration of the meaning of family that he began with his 2018 Palme d’Or winning drama Shoplifters. Though the movie’s slight crime narrative keeps the plot moving, it’s the irresistible and charming cast of characters that keep you engaged — particularly Song Kang-ho’s would-be patriarch Sang-hyeon and Lee Ji-eun’s (better known as singer-songwriter IU) flawed yet complex young mother So-young. Each character and performance feels like an actual person that lived a full life before the movie begins and Kore-eda finds those complexities as they continue to develop during the movie’s breezy running time.

Broker is premiering at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Neon acquired the movie for U.S. distribution prior to the festival.

At the start of Broker, we see So-young (Lee Ji-Eun, better known as popstar IU) leave her baby outside a “baby box,” a drop-off point where would-be mothers can leave their unwanted baby in safe hands. Some people would say that she was abandoning her child. But as police sergeant Soo-jin (Bae Doona) puts it later, So-young was protecting her baby. That is a theme throughout Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or competing drama, which premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. What is perceived as an act of selfishness by some could in fact be an act of love.

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It’s a similar theme to Kore-eda’s last movie, the Palme-winning Shoplifters, which presupposed that chosen families bonded by similar life experiences or trauma are stronger than those by blood.

However, Broker expands on that to explore the idea that families are only as strong as your actions to protect them. If it sounds like grounds for sentimentality, then you would be right. Kore-eda is a bit of a master when it comes to balancing sweetness with the realities of the world. And if Shoplifters and Broker are any indications he’s most interested in exploring them through complicated characters whose reasonings may not immediately seem just. 

Such is the case with the titular “brokers” of the movie — Sang-hyeon (Parasite’s Song Kang-ho and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) — who take babies from the baby box of a church and sells them to desperate families for the highest price. One of those babies is So-young’s Woo-sung who Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo feel they can sell despite his thin eyebrows — a fact that is hilariously brought up often. We’ll learn more about why the brokers feel just in their actions, even if it’s not their conscious reason. But that’s the beauty of Broker, Kore-eda fills his script with so many moments of empathy that it’s easy to understand such complex characters. 

Eventually, in a surprising change of heart, So-young comes back for Woo-sung. However, because of a technicality she no longer has parental rights to him. Instead, the broker pair convinces her to let them find him a family. The ever street-smart So-young instead uses the opportunity to ensure that Woo-sung goes to a home that deserves him rather than just any family with enough money to buy a baby.

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Though the entire cast is effortlessly charming with characters that feel lived-in with fully formed pasts and looking towards the future, it’s Song Kang-ho’s would-be patriarch Sang-hyeon and IU’s So-young that are the heart of the movie.

While larger plot machinations come into play including a criminal investigation run by detectives Soo-jin and Lee, the movie’s main focus is each character’s (including the investigators) relationship with their past — and the fight to become more than it. Sang-hyeon, who has an ex-wife and daughter, is seemingly never able to connect with them and is seen as flighty and inconsistent. On the other hand, So-young harbors a secret that gives her pause to start a family with Woo-sung. Though it sounds ripe for manufactured overwrought sentimentality, it never strays into melodrama.

In the most impactful scene in the movie on the precipice of their time together, So-young turns off the light in their hotel room — as to not have to face each member of their ragtag family — and says, “thank you for being born” to each one. There are no waterworks (except from me and the audience), no dramatic declarations, just five people in a room grateful to have found each other. The scene is earned rather than muscled in to pry a few tears from the audience.

Kore-eda understands that drama can be warm without unearned emotionalism. Broker may be charming and slightly heightened, but like any good tale, it’s based in something fully human.

Like Shoplifter before it, Broker doesn’t have an easy ending. Possibly not even one that you’d consider happy. As much as the movie is a serotonin booster and heartstrings-tugger, Kore-eda always finds his way back to the ground level. While this new family that we’ve come to love over a two-hour period may not get a happily ever after, they certainly get a “and life goes on” ending. Taken with Shoplifter, its spiritual prequel, Broker is a promise that although life has its ebbs and flows and happiness is fleeting, there is a way to survive it. And that way to survive is with each other.