Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Baby-Selling Drama Broker Refuses to Judge Its Characters

While some of these characters are deeply judgmental of one another, Broker itself treats each of its ensemble members with immense empathy. This is perhaps most explicitly depicted through Sang-hyeon, played by the professionally affable Song. When Dong-soo is cruel to So-young, he explains that his anger is really not about So-young at all. And when he sees how much So-young cares about Woo-sung, he reminds her that she is not alone. When Hae-jin (Im Seung-soo), a soccer-obsessed eight-year-old growing up at Dong-soo’s orphanage, stows away on their baby-selling trip, Sang-hyeon lets him name the van and doesn’t get mad when he opens the window in the middle of an automatic car wash. And, while they all (including Hae-jin!) care for Woo-sung, Sang-hyeon takes the lead, playing, cuddling and bathing the baby with care and attention, and seemingly happy to do so. We’re not intended to see his caring as a means to an end, but rather as an act that has value in and of itself—a rare, immensely important characterization for male characters.

And what of So-young, the character at the heart of this story? In a flatter film—in a cinematic world that so often does so poorly by female characters—she would be nothing more than a plot device. In Kore-eda’s, she has dimensions and narrative power. Other characters spend the film judging her, but she is the one most failed by society. “If I were alone, I would be helpless,” she tells Sang-hyeon. They’re at the hospital for Woo-sung, who gets sick with a bad cold—the implication being she was alone before. Abandoning Woo-sung was an act of love and care. She has every right to be furious that the systems have failed her so deeply that she gives up a child she wants. So-young has every right to be furious at the world, and maybe she is, but she is also open to caring and being cared for, when the opportunity finally, gloriously comes.

I understand why the Korean Film Council selected Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave to represent South Korea at the 2023 Academy Awards, even if I think Broker is the more interesting film. Visually, Decision to Leave is much flashier, while Broker’s formal complexity is intentionally subtle. Long, unbroken shots and natural lighting—in both day and night, rain and shine (Hong Kyung-pyo continues to demonstrate his incredible versatility as a cinematographer)—are used to give us a sense of a lived-in world we’ve been granted temporary access to rather than one constructed. In service of the film’s central theme, the mise-en-scene is deeply relational; characters are often framed in shot together, sometimes decentered to better emphasize setting. Kore-eda’s framing of So-young is particularly striking: Our view of her is often slightly obscured—by car seats, her hair or hood, or (in one emotionally climactic scene) by Dong-soo’s hand. It offers greater cinematic protection to this character in particular, who doesn’t get the safety and support she deserves in the world of the film.

In a different world, Sang-hyeon, Dong-soo, So-young, Hae-jin and Woo-sung could be a family, but they keep coming up against systems and expectations that remind them why they can’t keep each other. While Broker ultimately (mostly) reaffirms the power of the traditional nuclear family unit, it keeps space for more creative and flexible systems of caring—and is a more successful story for it. Every baby deserves to be loved and taken care of, but so does every adult. Broker does an impressive job of articulating how these two truths are inextricably intertwined.

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Writer: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring: Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, Bae Doona, Lee Ji-eun, Lee Joo-young
Release Date: December 26, 2022

Kayti Burt is a culture critic with bylines at TIME, MTV News, Refinery29, and Den of Geek. For more pop culture analysis, including K-culture context, you can follow her @kaytiburt and visit her website.