“Broker” (2022) is Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda’s latest film set in South Korea. When a woman abandons her baby at a church with a note promising that she will return then keeps her promise, it sets off an unexpected chain of events that changes everyone’s lives forever.

“Broker” is a Rube Goldbergian road trip movie about how the underclass is the only one that mends a broken society and is more just and upstanding than the establishment. The human traffickers work with the mother, So-young, aka Sun-ah (singer Lee Ji-eun), to find the best home for the baby, Woo-sung. These affable, downtrodden criminals are more interested in children’s welfare than profit as evinced by their rundown van. There is an explicit critique of the established adoption system and the exporting of South Korean children to other countries, which the human traffickers guard against. A group of liars becomes a paragon of family willing to do anything for each other, protect the child’s link to his family and respect the birth mother. It is one of the few films that depicts the ideal outcome of adoption by acknowledging the inherent trauma of separating a child from their parent, preserving the child’s link to the past and having selfless people prioritize the child’s welfare over their need to have the child heal for their emotional wounds. 

Song is the heart of “Broker,” and probably the main reason that Koreeda set the film in South Korea. Pair Song with any actor, and there is immediate chemistry: paternal, fraternal, etc. He is so organic, warm and a pillar of strength and gentleness. Song’s character, Ha Sang-hyeon, is the makeshift patriarch of this improvisational family, the titular broker. He is framed as a reformed, repentant man trying to make amends for his own personal failings while repaying dubious debts, and his face lights up whenever he interacts with someone. Because we do not have a lot of media images of men as primary caregivers with children, Song is a much-needed antidote. My favorite Ha moment is when he advises a cop how his shirts need to be treated. His real calling is caring for clothes. It is a cute moment, especially since the group is trying to evade the law.

Dong-soo (Gang Dong-woo) is his partner in crime. Koreeda’s vision for Dong-soo felt uneven though the character is likeable. Dong-soo feels like a benevolent innocent with a random dark side, capable of physical harm in the service of the greater good. I never understood how Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo initially got together, but I did buy their partnership and friendship. He sees himself in the children that he rescues and wants to save them from a lifetime of being in an orphanage. There is a soupcon of flirtation between him and the mother, which feels off because on one hand, he sees her as the mother figure that he always imagined, someone who comes back, but she is also young, cute and unrelated. While Gang does a great job balancing his character’s potentially off-putting polar characteristics, Koreeda should have given the character more thought.

Normally Koreeda is superb at writing women, but something felt off with the women characters in “Broker.” Sarge (Bae Doona) is bitter and driven because she cannot have a kid. Eye roll. Always feels vaguely misogynistic to create such archetypes. Detective Lee (Lee Joo-young) felt unformed and like a human placeholder for Sarge to talk to. So-young plays the jaded femme fatale with the cops and with the criminals, the numb, stunned mother gradually returning to normal life. The flirty moment with Doo-song, “Come and meet me with an umbrella if it rains,” while cute, was distracting and seemed unrealistic given her entire story. I do not think that she would be interested in anyone given her circumstances. 

Koreeda is one of my favorite directors, but I went into “Broker” with some trepidation that never got allayed. Koreeda is in his “social conscious” film era and succeeds in challenging himself to elevate and humanize a villainous professional such as a human trafficker to change the viewer’s mind from instinctual judgment to empathizing with the individual. I recognize that I am an outsider who knows very little Asian history so when I make parallels to dynamics that I am familiar with, in this case, colonialism, I understand that my comparison may be inaccurate and am open to being corrected. I still want to make the point because I never saw it addressed, and to me, it is the elephant in the room. With that said, if the iconic Song is willing to star in Koreeda’s film along with a slew of well-respected South Korean actors, perhaps that is the implicit answer to my question.

Koreeda’s “social conscious” films are usually set in Japan thus are an implicit critique of Japanese society. Japan colonized South Korea, tried to destroy South Korean culture and may be responsible for many of the problems that South Koreans face today. “Pachinko” (2022) depicted how Japanese people used to stigmatize and dismiss South Korean people as criminals and trafficked South Korean women and girls without an apology to this day. So when Koreeda decides to focus on Japanese criminals, he is rooting for the underdog, but when he focuses on a majority of South Korean characters who are murderers, gangsters and prostitutes, regardless of whether it is intentional or they are loveable, it is still perpetuating Japanese stereotypes about South Koreans. It felt offensive, especially the murder part, which felt dropped out of nowhere and was unnecessary in the story except to show depth of feeling and devotion. There is one scene where one character admonishes another not to kill someone attacking them because “He is the son of someone I know,” but that gets erased by the end of “Broker.” An important part of social conscious films should be even a brief nod of accountability by those responsible for social ills. To truly sympathize with indigenous people, a colonizer needs to repent and ask for forgiveness otherwise it can come off as a new archetype of a noble savage, the unsophisticated criminal, who is also slick enough to pull off a lot of shady shit.

Even if my concerns are unfounded, which they could be, “Broker” never felt like a cohesive whole. It felt like “Shoplifters” (2018) with a dash of “After the Storm” (2016) and “I Wish” (2011). Again I could be the problem, but it is the first Koreeda film during which I nodded off, and I was not tired so it was not a great sign. I could have missed important details though I was not asleep for a long time. Koreeda’s goal is to form a cohesive family unit out of disparate parts, which he achieves by the end of the movie because of the cast’s acting ability, not the narrative.  While not his strongest, a Koreeda film is still better than the average film, maybe even better than some filmmakers’ best films. Koreeda fans who want to stay home will have an opportunity to watch “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House” (2023), a series being released on Netflix today.

Unrelated side note: Did “The Third Murder” inspire “Decision to Leave” (2022)?