Broker 4K 2022 KOREAN

Pursued by detectives, two men who kidnap and sell foundlings become close to the girl who left her son on the ground at the 'window of life' and the boy who escaped from the orphanage. For a brief period they become a semblance of family.

The Palme d'Or Award-winning 'Shoplifters' already seemed overly secondary (an unsightly interweaving of previous works, notably 'No One Knows', 'Son to Father'), and yet another reflection on the essence of kinship ('Truth' was in French and English, the new film in Korean; the decision to shoot in other languages is right) hardly surprises anyone, but there is more to this picture.

The activities of the 'intermediaries' lack moral clarity. Innocent by nature, they try to provide a better future for the children whose parents have abandoned them, but they make money from it. They are motivated not by altruism but by self-interest. The reverent care of an infant, in which the deep-seated need to care for someone is realized, is combined with an attitude toward the child as a thing, a commodity. Both temporary caregivers are lonely: one does not want to see her daughter, the other has been disowned by her mother as a child (the degree of attachment to the older companion is expressed in the climax, in a touching-looking 'I don't know'). A personal tragedy is felt in each character. Bribed by a lyrical intonation, Koreeda unfolds the social drama of child trafficking as a statement of the general orphanhood of the neglected.