The game I enjoy playing so much, "what happens when Major International Film Auteur X moves outside of their native country and native language for the first time?" has been given a particularly unexpected pair of answers by Kore-eda Hirokazu, the Japanese creator of so many feather-soft stories of people on the edge of the world finding each other. After scoring what I think can be easily argued to be the most significant (if not necessarily the best) success of his career with the 2018 Palme d'Or winner Shoplifters, Kore-eda's next two features, his 14th and 15th overall, were both made outside of Japan, and they take completely opposite approaches to what that could mean. 2019's The Truth, made in France, is (to my eyes) completely unrecognisable as a Kore-eda film, setting Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche against each other for the first time ever in a film that isĀ 110% a French diva-fight, and one would never for a moment suppose it was made by anyone other than a solid but unexceptional French journeyman director. And now, his new Broker takes him a substantial part of the way back east, ending up in South Korea, where he is making a kind of secret Bong Joon-ho film - it stars Bong's most reliable leading man, Song Kang-ho, and was shot by Hong Kyung-pyo, Bong's "guy" (though I actually think his best work to date was in The Wailing, for director Na Hong-jin), and it seems generally like there was some calculation made about the recent, sudden visibility of Korean cinema at the worldwide box office in Kore-eda landing where he did - it is, if nothing else, impossible for me to imagine that the word "Parasite" occurred in none of the pitch meeting (or, anyway, the Japanese and/or Korean titles of that film).

And despite this, Broker isn't just recognisable as a Kore-eda film, unlike The Truth: it is maybe the most possible amount of a Kore-eda film. It checks all the boxes, exactly the way one would anticipate that they'd be checked - he is, in a sense "doing a Kore-eda" in just the same way that e.g. Tim Burton fell into the gloomy trap of "doing a Burton" in the 2000s. And while I think it is merely accurate to say that Broker is a much better experience than the vast majority of what Burton has been sullenly churning out for the last couple of decades, Kore-eda's latest has a similarly dispiriting overall vibe of something that wasn't really created out of any sense of artistic inspiration, and more as a sort of deliberate calculation: "well, I know they like this."

That was good enough to net Broker a competition slot at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, and to win Song Best Actor there as well, but honestly, the whole thing leaves me feeling a bit undernourished. There is unmistakable greatness here: Hong's cinematography is a dumbfounding triumph, instantly rocketing up to the top echelons of my pick for the year's best-shot movie, if not even taking the very top spot. And there is unmistakable shit: I am open to hearing arguments that the cloying, in-your-face score by Jung Jae-il (another one of Bong's guys) is in fact doing something useful with its somewhat irritatingly snappy, sassy playfulness, but I don't think I could possibly be persuaded that it's not ultimately a significant weight around the film's neck. But it all averages out to a sort of pre-chewed quality, a feeling that we've been here and seen this done considerably better, by Kore-eda and others.

The plot hook, at least, is slightly irresistible: Sang-hyeon (Song), the owner of a laundry, and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), who works at a church, have gone into business selling the orphaned infants who show up in the church's "baby box", where mothers who are for whatever reason unable or unwilling to take care of their children can leave them anonymously. This isn't even entirely a cold-blooded mercenary endeavor: Dong-soo was himself an orphan, and his belief that in selling these abandoned babies to people desperate for children but unable to conceive, he can keep more children from growing up with the same lack of love he felt. Standing opposite them are two cops, Soo-jin (Bae Doona) and Lee (Lee Joo-young), who are looking for an opportunity to bust the two black marketeers, but need to catch them in the act if the charge is going to stick. And it's the perfect opportunity, since something exceptional has just happened: So-young (Lee Ji-eun, a major K-pop artist under the stage name IU), a mother who abandoned her child Woo-sung with a particular lack of care or interest, has unexpectedly come back to the church, with Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo having already snatched him up. She doesn't want the baby back, but she does suddenly find herself invested in his future enough to make sure that he ends up with deserving parents. And if she gets a cut, so much the better. Now the cops have a potential wedge, trailing at a distance looking for an opportunity as Sang-hyeon, Dong-soo, and So-young travel looking for the right buyers, also having accidentally taken along another orphan from the church, Hae-jin (Im Seung-soo), and he's old enough to be a chatterbox along the road.

I suppose it's possible to imagine a number of ways for this to play out, but with this particular pedigree, it's no surprise that the five passengers in Sang-hyeon's laundry van end up forming a kind of ad hoc family of the unloved, and that Soo-jin's hard-ass cop routine will start to founder, and there will be much tenderness, though things do lead to a hard-edged realism that acknowledges that society has rules, fairly or not, and people who break those rules get smashed up a bit along the way. You could almost literally set your watch to it: the scene where Sang-hyeon, Dong-soo, and So-young start to thaw out around each other by each sharing precisely one major secret about themselves and their past happens almost exactly midway through the 129-minute film.

Broker is, that is to say, a bit schematic, not just as a Kore-eda film, but as the exact sort of warm-but-honest character study of people who've been lost between the cracks of the world, which gets kind but not glowing notices from all of the major film festivals where it plays. To be a bit less cynical about, this does work: the acting is very strong, though rarely actively great, notwithstanding Song's win at Cannes. In truth, he's not even my favorite performance here: Bae's performance as Soo-jin starts out in a marvelous register of slightly distracted, fleshy pragmatism, trotting out the old chestnut where every time we see here, she's eating something. It's a gimmick, but one that never fails to please me, and this is maybe the best I've ever seen Bae in anything; she's doing the most of anybody to go against the most obvious choices available here. This means, sadly, that she's got the least foundation to build off of once Broker goes firmly in the direction of sentiment (and it is a decidedly sentimental film, unlike some of Kore-eda's earlier, tetchier depictions of a society that isn't working for its most vulnerable members), and she pretty clearly loses the character along the way; or maybe it's the character that loses her.

Regardless, the interactions between the various cast members are all more than good enough to put over the story, and to sell us on the specifics of these characters, however schematic their journey might be. Very little about Broker is "bad", just kind of empty and weightless. And what it does at least have to keep it on track is Hong's gorgeous cinematography, which uses hard directional lighting and strong saturation to create some of the most bright, sharp images I've seen all year. This works out well for the film during its daytime scenes, but it threatens to turn it into a full-on masterpiece during its night scenes, which use remarkably well-controlled neon to paint the world in garish colors that add a sense of vitality and playfulness to the somewhat grubby scenario, but also in a targeted and exacting way, with none of the fuzziness that neon generally brings with it. It's a stunning portrait of the cities of Korea at night as places full of promise as much as loss, and I don't think I've seen anything that plays a similar trick better since 2019's The Wild Goose Lake. Admittedly, there's not a single thing about Broker that insist on having this kind of entrancingly sharp visual style; regardless of how much I love the cinematography, it's not a "cinematography movie". But I'm very happy that it was here for me when I needed it.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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