Going for Broke
The complexity of adoption is poignantly examined in the Korean-language Broker, where a road trip to sell a baby to the highest bidder transforms into a story of an unlikely family.
good.film
2 years ago
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Broker (South Korea, 129 min, Hirokazu Kore-eda). Two friends go on a road trip to sell an abandoned baby - while detectives quietly track them to catch them in the act.
Key social insight? In Korea, the stigma of shame around single motherhood and lack of social support services often leave women with no choice but to give up their newborns. A change in South Korean adoption law requiring registration saw a drastic increase in the number of babies abandoned anonymously by their mothers, leading to lifelong trauma for both mother and child. Broker examines this broken system, reminding us that our complex social fabric isn’t sewn from black & white, and asking us to question what happens in the grey areas.
What causes does Broker explore? Adoption & Fostering
We’ve heard of the baby boom, but Broker takes us into an undercover world in South Korea where the baby business is booming. Yes, the ‘brokers’ in Broker are selling a baby. We know how shady that sounds, but this isn’t “The Sopranos: Seoul Edition.” These guys aren’t soulless, underhanded criminals, although their actions aren’t exactly legal. To really get it, you need to understand the concept of a “baby box”. And no, it’s not a gift basket you get for a new Mum…
What is Broker about?
Meet Ha Sang-hyeon, a hardworking laundry owner who’s always in debt. Good bloke: friendly with the locals, gives out free stain removal advice (handy!) and volunteers at the church down the road with his buddy Dong-soo, who has an adoption story himself - more on that later. The church has a ‘baby box’: imagine a library drop-off hatch, but instead of leaving books, it’s a place where mothers in extreme circumstances can safely & anonymously leave their babies to be cared for. It’s this system that Moon So-young turns to one rainy night, leaving her young son behind - while, unbeknownst to her, two determined female detectives are watching on…
Why? Because Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo are pulling a swifty on the baby box, stealing babies and deleting the security footage to sell them on the black market for adoption. What’s Korean for ‘plot twist’?! That’s a little more brazen than your standard markup on a hot stereo system that fell off the back of a truck. To charge them, the detectives need to catch them in the act. But is it weird to admit we kinda want Sang-hyeon & Dong-soo to not get caught?
“Someone threw him away, so someone like us needs to sell him.” ~ Dong-soo, ‘Broker’
Look, we never thought we’d end up empathising with baby traffickers, but trust us when we say these guys aren’t the villains of this story. Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo can happily justify their actions: if they can give a baby a better life, with loving parents, and profit at the same time, where’s the harm? It’s that ‘superpower’ that movies can have: the way they help us see the humanity behind all kinds of actions, good or morally questionable.
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What causes does Broker explore?
Director Kore-eda has taken a morally complex issue and infused it with humanity and heart. A Japanese native, he knew about the concept of ‘baby boxes’, but only a handful exist in his home country, whereas “in Korea, it was more frequently used and considered a topic of social discussion compared to Japan.” He’d found his setting; next came the themes. South Korea has one of the widest wealth gaps and highest income inequity in the world, so lo and behold, his characters’ “side hustle” of baby brokerage arise from their economic struggles.
Social security and morality are also big themes: not only is there a long-standing cultural stigma in South Korea that discourages unwed mothers to raise their children, but unbelievably, government support for single mothers didn’t even exist until 2003. As a result, nearly 93% of kids in the Korean adoption system are given up by single mums, who are often made to feel invisible, ashamed and outcast by their families.
The story deepens when, stopped at an orphanage, Dong-soo reveals it’s where he himself grew up. We quickly realise that he knows better than any of them about the pain of being abandoned, and the lifelong trauma and questions that can accompany an adult who was “given away” as a kid, assuming they were unloved and unwanted. In a bleak irony, this leads to future trauma for the mothers left behind, too: according to case studies collected by the Australian Department of Social Services, “Mothers continue to be traumatised by the thought that their child will grow up thinking that they were not wanted… one mother stated, ‘It wasn’t the children who were not wanted. Mothers weren’t wanted because they were unmarried.’”
“The stage is set for a quietly eccentric road movie that appears to be about the nature of families, but is really about the yearning for intimacy in the modern world of alienation.” ~ Kevin Maher
When the trio find that they’ve collected a little stowaway (cheeky 8 year old Hae-jin, who snuck into their van from the orphanage grounds), it asks us to further redefine what we think of as “family”. To outsiders looking in, they could easily be one: mother, father, uncle, brother. And as these strangers bond and laugh on the journey, we begin to see them that way too. While it might sound a bit Disney, the road trip to find the baby a new family results in them becoming a family. And, well… who’s to say they aren’t?
Hit me with some Broker trivia! The young mother character is played by Ji-eun Lee, who’s a major pop star known as “IU” and one of the highest-earning celebrities in South Korea. She researched how society views single mothers and the hardships they go through to prepare for the role. Broker was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, and went on to win prizes at the Cannes, Munich, Norway and Venice Film Festivals.
How will Broker make me feel?
Broker proves that you don’t need to be biologically related to feel loved and connected. There’s an inherent care factor when a tiny human is at the core of these character’s actions, so we invest. We struggle with the conflict So-young feels at deciding who ends up raising her son, and we feel her pain when she questions the circumstances that led to giving him up in the first place.
“The journey taken by the characters was shot in sequence, and in this way our emotions built up and we naturally began to feel like a family. I hope people experience this as a warm film that inspires them to ask themselves the question, ‘What is a family?’” ~ ‘Broker’ actor Gang Dong-won (Dong-soo)
One of the most pointed scenes comes in a flashback, when we see the two female detectives watching So-young leave her tiny son at the baby box from their cop car in the shadows. “Why should we be tasked to arrest her after she leaves him?”, the younger detective asks her senior, hypothetically. “Why couldn’t we help her before?” It’s a very human question about who we want to be as a society that’s left hanging in the air for us to ponder.
Ultimately, though, what we feel over the course of Broker is a connection to people in transformation; of Sang-hyeon from being motivated by money, to genuine affection. Of Dong-soo, from blunt dismissal of the mother who left her son, to falling in love with her. And of So-young, from being a closed book out of self-protection, to having openness and connection. We also see a really, really cute baby, which is never not fun.
But we’ll leave the last word to writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who clearly wanted to put a story into the world that reaffirmed, amid wrenching pain, the positivity that adoption can offer. “I did not want [Broker to show] an ending where the abandoned child regrets being born, or the mother regrets having the child. I wanted the film to deliver the message, ‘It was good to be born.’ In that sense, Broker is a film about life.”
What are the top 10 movies & TV shows that explore adoption? Discover them at good.film!
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