Bro­ker

Deep in Hirokazu Koreeda’s typ­i­cal­ly gen­tle yet pierc­ing new nor­mal fam­i­ly dra­ma Bro­ker, one char­ac­ter lis­tens to Aimee Mann’s hushed bal­lad ​‘Wise Up’. Like any red-blood­ed cit­i­zen of the plan­et Earth, she imme­di­ate­ly thinks of Paul Thomas Ander­son using that cut for the emo­tion­al cli­max of his mosa­ic mas­ter­piece Mag­no­lia, referred to as ​“that movie” which didn’t total­ly make sense but nonethe­less con­nect­ed on a deep­er lev­el of per­son­al resonance.

There’s noth­ing so baro­que­ly metaphor­i­cal as a rain of frogs in Koreeda’s lat­est, linked instead by the imper­fect rela­tion­ships between lone­ly peo­ple in search of some­one to hold on to in a chaot­ic, indif­fer­ent world. The woman hav­ing a moment of intro­spec­tion with Mann is Soo-jin (Bae Doona), a law enforce­ment offi­cial inves­ti­gat­ing a doozy of a moral thick­et, in which aban­don­ment can be an act of con­flict­ed com­pas­sion and child traf­fick­ing might just be an expres­sion of love.

She mon­i­tors and lat­er inserts her­self in a crim­i­nal scheme with uncom­mon­ly decent inten­tions, its finan­cial motives melt­ing away lit­tle by lit­tle to leave a naked grasp at nur­tur­ing, in what­ev­er form it may come. In the open­ing min­utes, So-young (Lee Ji-eun) has left her infant in one of the ​‘baby box­es’ found at church­es around South Korea, no-ques­tions-asked drop-off points for moth­ers unable or unwill­ing to raise their off­spring them­selves. She leaves a note that she’ll be back for lit­tle Woo-sung, unaware that this means he will be made inel­i­gi­ble for adop­tion and most like­ly live out his boy­hood in an orphanage.

Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) have built a spot­ti­ly eth­i­cal hus­tle around this coun­ter­in­tu­itive quirk of pro­to­col, sell­ing these bun­dles of joy to lov­ing par­ents instead of let­ting them lan­guish in the sys­tem – except that unlike most of the moth­ers who promise to return, So-young real­ly does. So begins an improb­a­bly heart­warm­ing road trip, as the three set off en route to Woo-sung’s prospec­tive par­ents, joined by a sev­en-year-old escap­ing the same group home they’re all try­ing to avoid.

When Soo-jin final­ly steps in and gets So-young under her thumb, we realise just how invest­ed we’ve become in the suc­cess of what the cop must remind us – and her­self – is a human smug­gling oper­a­tion. But nothing’s so black-and-white in Koreeda’s uni­verse of soft­ened greys, whether it’s a more com­pli­cat­ed stance on abor­tion than a first glance might sug­gest, or the flesh­ing-out of the new par­ents even­tu­al­ly enter­ing the pic­ture for Woo-sung. Everyone’s reach­ing for a sys­tem of sup­port. In most cas­es, allowed by Koree­da with admirable gen­eros­i­ty, they can latch on to one another.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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