Country: Japan/South Korea
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Time: 2 hours and 9 minutes
What It Evokes: Atypical family structures, road trips, warm worlds within trying circumstances
Where Can I Get It: In theaters, soon to streaming
A young mother, aptly named So-young, drops off her baby at a church in Busan, South Korea in the middle of the night, pinning a note to the child’s bassinet stating that she will return. (We are later told that only one in forty mothers who leave such notes come back to retrieve their children.) In theory, the church will care for her son and facilitate his adoption. In practice, the two men on the night shift (currently under surveillance by the police) are child brokers. They intend to sell the baby to potential parents who, for whatever reason, will pay good money for a newborn. Unhappily for the brokers, So-young does return, eventually finding and confronting the men who have taken her child. After discussing the nature of their business, she agrees to help them vet new parents, negotiating a split of the proceeds. It’s a grim set-up. But because we are in the hands of the great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, the film’s bleak beginnings give way to an immensely warm and generous movie exploring how individuals forge families, not dissolve them.
Kore-eda’s films have long explored atypical family structures by depicting the ways in which individuals constitute and re-constitute familial bonds absent (or in spite of) blood ties. In Our Little Sister (2015), three sisters welcome their half-sister into their home—they share a father—though the “little sister’s” mother, also deceased, broke up the marriage of her older siblings’ parents. In turn, their newfound intimacy allows each to take control over their lives, while coming to terms with the past. In his magisterial (and Cannes Palme D’Or-winning) Shoplifters (2018), a group of unrelated and marginalized individuals live together in Tokyo as a “family” after the introduction of a young girl whose parents have effectively abandoned her. (The title derives from their primary mode of self-support.) Along similar lines, Brokers emerged from Kore-eda’s interests in adoption and ‘baby hatches’ (safe spaces for parents to leave small children for whom they cannot care). The relative prevalence of these ‘baby boxes’ in South Korea led him to film in that country instead of his native Japan. (When asked about the language barrier between director and actors, he replied in a fashion reminiscent of his work’s views on human relationships: “There can be trouble communicating even among people who speak the same language…The important thing is…how you overcome it.”)
The answer for his characters remains acts of care. The eponymous child brokers—one of whom runs a struggling dry cleaners and owes money to local loan sharks, the other of whom grew up in an orphanage—build a “family” with So-young (alongside a boy who runs away from his orphanage) as they hit the road trying to find the right parents for So-young’s child. Upon greater exposure, she is no longer a callous mother in their eyes, they are no longer mere child merchants in hers. As we learn more about each member of this motley crew, including the police officers who have been charged with nabbing the brokers and who function as (richly humanized) metaphors for the inability of the state to grasp the complexity underlying individual lives, each characters’ background (and the ways their past relationships and future desires inform their current undertakings) help generate a dynamic allowing each person to seek what they lack.
In attempting to capture the experience of children put up for care and the mothers who leave them (for reasons often unknown to those children), Kore-eda surfaces the tensions and guilt borne of abandonment and absence. Precisely because of this turbulence, So-young, the brokers, the orphaned child, and So-young’s infant constitute themselves as a family through the provision of sustained attention and understanding (if not always endorsement). In this world, families do not result from genealogical stricture, but are instead formed and re-affirmed. That they remain provisional only lends them greater emotional weight. Indeed, this particular “family” structure’s intensity exists because it cannot last—the state will inevitably impinge. (State authorities have long played an interesting role in certain Kore-eda films through their imposition of narrow, legalistic conceptions of the family.)
Throughout, the film showcases many of Kore-eda’s strengths as a director: his ability to draw from different genres without feeling the need to assume their full weight, warm lighting and film scores that shape (instead of merely reinforce) the emotional tenor of scenes, and an extreme generosity towards immensely flawed characters. In turn, this allows for difficult subject matter to be handled lightly, without minimizing its nuance. Kore-eda remains a master of controlled sentimentality and constrained hope, managing to foreground immense warmth and kindness without crossing the threshold into cloyingness. His work remains a continual delight to watch.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Hirokazu Kore-eda ‑ Shoplifters (2018)
Hirokazu Kore-eda ‑ Our Little Sister (2015)