Blissful codependency – Weekend
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A new film by the quiet Japanese genius Hirokazu Kore-eda “Intermediaries” is being released, which, even using the example of gopniks who traffic in children, tells about what kind of good people live on our planet.
The South Korean city of Busan, rain, night, a young mother leaves her baby in front of the church, puts a note in the diaper, where she promises to return for him. She needs to do something, the baby will interfere. The policewoman sees all this, she picks up the baby and puts it in the church “baby box”, from where the foundlings are sent to the church shelter. The police need to solve the child trafficking case. From the “children’s box” the baby is taken out by two mischievous intermediaries, who immediately begin to look for a good family for the boy. They need money. But the next morning, the young mother (by the way, she is a prostitute and a murderer) returns for the child, and now they all travel around Korea in a broken-down minibus in search of the ideal family for the child. They are joined by a boy who escaped from the shelter, and they are followed by a policewoman with a partner, ready to arrest everyone at the time of the sale of the baby.
The plots from which The Brokers are born would fit the most sentimental drama, a pro-life manifesto, a soap series about abandoned children and unforgiven mothers, social denunciation, a bloody thriller about greedy crooks. But the Japanese Hirokazu Koreeda does not parasitize on social problems, does not entertain the viewer, does not try to imitate the blows of fate so that the characters suffer in various ways. He shoots the most tender dramedy, a road movie about those who refuse to suffer, a rom-com about how a real family is born.
Kore-eda tries on this main theme all his life. And he always comes to the same conclusion: everything will be fine. He said that the idea of ”Mediators” came to him during the filming of the drama “What is the father, such is the son” (2013): there, according to the plot, the rich man and the poor found that their children were changed in the maternity hospital, and they tried to decide what happened to to do this. What is a family: people with the same genes as you, or people who laugh at the same things that you think are funny? In Shoplifters (2018), which received the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Kore-eda solved this “family issue” more radically: the public followed a marginal family that traded in petty theft, and then it turned out that the characters were not related by blood ties, they just were comfortable with each other. In this “convenient” real family love was born. Finally, in The Intermediaries, the director shows the moment when several restless outcasts are nearby and begin to lie to each other, the moment when blissful codependency is born. A moment of inescapable tenderness, endless tenderness, the moment of the emergence of a real family.
Koreeda chose to shoot the film in South Korea because there are “baby boxes”, “baby boxes” where you can leave unwanted babies. He always wanted to know “what exactly makes a family a family”, always explored the strength of family ties, the ease with which someone takes on the role of parents, and someone refuses it. As the characters in The Brokers travel from city to city in their van to meet the baby’s potential parents, they look even more like close relatives than the dysfunctional family in the American indie hit Little Miss Sunshine.
Kore-eda, who originally wanted to make a “touching and emotional film,” talks not about a dysfunctional, but about a superfunctional family consisting of marginals – but he is interested in them not as marginals, but as people, not as social masks, but as social animals running from loneliness. A young prostitute, child traffickers, petty mafia gopniks, a shelter boy with a soccer ball (his name is on the ball so that the ball is not stolen) – as soon as the viewer wants to hang some kind of label on them, they themselves, laughing, confess their sins. This is the disarming charm of Kore-eda’s films: he is sure that cinema is not a means of denunciation. “I never made films to praise or criticize something.” He is not interested in the relationship of the family, private property and the state. He is interested in people who accidentally or not accidentally find themselves together – in the same house, in the same minibus, on the same planet – and then remember this all their lives.
In his brilliant “After Life” (1998), the dead heroes found themselves at a posthumous checkpoint and recalled the happiest moment of their lives in order to film it, save it forever, and only after that go somewhere further. Volunteers helped the deceased choose the best fragment. The film was partly documentary, part of the roles were played by non-professional actors, they shared their own real memories. It seems that all subsequent films of Kore-eda are a story about how many such happy moments can be found even in the most shabby, hopeless, senselessly bitter life.
As in “Shoplifters,” the title of “The Brokers” is given a social role, a term from a possible (or real) court case, something for which these people can be imprisoned or despised. But Kore-eda’s films are aimed specifically at making the viewer see behind the term of a person, behind the title of the film – his unhurried rhythm, slow joy, quiet night lights. Shoplifters steal in order to be together. Well, to get food, of course. Intermediaries sell children so that the children do not repeat their fate, so that the children are happy. Well, for money, of course. Koreeda does not condemn anyone – and does not justify anyone. The main emotion of The Middlemen, like all his other films, is humble curiosity. The director refuses to evaluate, he is not interested in moralizing, he does not study people, but looks at them – and rejoices as a child rejoices at his parents or as a kind grandmother rejoices at her grandchildren. They are such rascals.
The most powerful episodes, balancing on the verge of sentimentality and catharsis, Kore-eda shoots without thinking about the reaction of the public, but thinking only about his heroes. He entrusts the fate of the film to the actors – and they either fool around, or try to hold back tears. Song Kang-ho (“Parasite”, “Snowpiercer”, “Memories of a Murder”, “Dinosaur Invasion”), who won the Cannes Film Festival award for this role, knows how to be ridiculous and funny, but he also knows how to seem like a tragic Pierrot. The young mother is played by Lee Ji Eun, a K-pop star better known as IU. Bae Doo Na (“Cloud Atlas”, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”) starred in Kore-eda’s movie “Inflatable Doll” (2009), in “The Brokers” she is an aged policewoman who has not come to terms with the tragedy of her life, who understands which does something wrong.
Who among us is doing the right thing? Yes, no one. All Kore-eda’s films are made up of small stories, private mistakes and hopes. He says he “doesn’t really feel connected to Japanese cinema” and lists Angelopoulos and Hou Xiaoxian, and even Dostoyevsky, among his idols—rather than Ozu, as one would expect from a Japanese family drama director.
Well, according to the precepts of Dostoevsky, the heroes of Hirokazu Kore-eda love to live, and not to look for the meaning of life, they believe that humanity cannot live without generous ideas, and sometimes they think about a tear of a child. Not in the sense that the happiness of the whole world is not worth a child’s tears, but simply – wipe it off soon, here’s a napkin for you, ghouls, ghouls, go away. Whether you’re a bad parent, a workaholic, a murderer, a baby, you deserve at the very least to be heard. And then, as it turns out, they will put you in jail, change the diaper, sell it to good people, wipe away a tear. Nothing, nothing. Everything will be fine.
In theaters from 24 August
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