Broker review

If international cinema somehow turned into a high-profile body-swapping Hollywood film and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda ended up swapping lives with Michael Bay, you can imagine. IX transformers in a sense, it would be a subtle and sweet story of Megatron seeking solace in a newfound Autobot family. (By contrast, Michael Bay would make movies about a Tokyo mother and daughter blowing shit up.) In movies like From such a stick to such a splinter AND thieves Kore-eda has proven to be a master of weaving perfectly crafted stories about how we tie and tie without jarring. His last of him, runnerhis first film in Korea after a trip to France for The truthcontinues the tradition by offering a sad, wise and quietly funny take on the search for connections and identities wherever we can find them.

runner We start with an energetic and economically sketched staging. A young woman, So-young (Ji-eun Lee), leaves her baby, Woo-Sung, in a baby box run by a church (think ATM meets service hatch), a shelter for children . leaving their children unwanted. reassured in knowing that their children will find their way through the healthcare system. Only Woo-Sung won’t do it. Two adoption agents Sang-hyun (Parasite‘s Song Kang-ho, giving the film a big heart center) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) steal the baby with the intention of selling it on the black baby market for 10 million won (strangely, the current compensation for girls is two million less). It’s a surefire money-making ploy foiled by So-young, who discovers their subterfuge and instead of demanding the return of her baby, she demands to be cut from the racketeering. What none of the three know is that a pair of detectives (Doona Bae and Lee Joo Young, who share a fascinating relationship) are watching the baby box and hoping to catch the riders in the act.

At this point, runner progress as it becomes a road movie, the quartet travels around Korea in a rickety van full of dry cleaners, looking for potential buyers for Woo-Sung. Along the way, the four become five when Hae-jin (Im Seung-so), a high-pitched seven-year-old boy, gets into his truck after a visit to an orphanage. In Kore-eda style, the film turns into a fascinating study of a makeshift family living on the fringes of society. It does not reach the heights of thievesbut it’s hard to think of a director working right now who is more generous with his characters than Kore-eda, deftly drawing non-judgmental portraits of flawed people with zero condescension and the utmost humanity.

The film plays with conventional plot elements much more than the usual Kore-eda setting: there’s suspense, some sort of fighting (although sadly no Autobot background). And compared to the sobriety of the English butler employed by Emma Thompson, Kore-eda’s trademark, he flirts with sentimentality. But there are big scenes after big scenes: the first attempt to sell the baby, the cops trying out a fake couple hoping to catch the bikers, a touching conversation on the Ferris wheel, and when sympathy is so great, the air of melancholy it’s so powerful. , it’s easy to fall in love with her many charms.