Review of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film “The Middlemen”

The tragicomedy The Middlemen by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, filmed in South Korea with local actors, is being released. One of them, Song Kang Ho, won the Best Actor Award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Together with a humanistic director, the ensemble of actors tries to awaken in the audience, if not sympathy, then understanding towards people who traffic in babies – and, oddly enough, they succeed. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

Hirokazu Kore-eda is a classic of Japanese cinema who has been filming since the 1990s. However, his fame went beyond the circle of Asian and festival film fans in 2018, when his “Shoplifters” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and then was nominated for an Oscar for the best foreign language picture. This was not the first tape that Kore-eda brought to the world’s main film festival: before “Thieves”, “Distance” (2001), “Nobody Knows” (2004), which received the Jury Prize “Son to Father” (2013), ” Diary of Umimachi (2015) and After the Storm (2016). And all these films are united by the theme of the formation and disintegration of family ties.

What makes a family a family – blood ties or soul ties that arise between people who are not connected by a common DNA? Kore-eda returns to this question again and again, both in Pravda (2019), which followed The Thieves, his first film shot outside his native country, in France with French stars, and in The Intermediaries, the idea of ​​​​which came to him even while working on the film “Son into Father”, which dealt with children mixed up in the hospital. Studying how the adoption system works, he drew attention to South Korea, where, unlike Japan, baby boxes are widespread, in which mothers can anonymously leave children they cannot or do not want to raise themselves.

It is at such a baby box, installed in one of the churches of Busan, that the film begins. On a deserted rainy night, a young woman (Lee Ji Eun) leaves a baby here – not even in the box itself, but simply on the floor nearby. But two police investigators are watching her, and one of them (Bae Doo Na), taking pity, nevertheless shifts him to a baby box. From there, it falls into the hands of the church’s orphanage employee Dong-soo (Kang Dong Won) and volunteer acolyte Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), who, having erased the CCTV footage, take it away to hand it over – of course, not free of charge – to those who wants a child, but for some reason does not want to get involved in the official adoption process.

In the baby’s diaper there is a note with his name – Woo-song – and the promise of his mother to return for him. Dong-soo, who himself was brought up in an orphanage, knows that women are able to keep this promise in one case in forty, but Woo-seong’s mother, whose name is So-yang, does indeed come the next morning. However, she is still not ready to leave her son, so for a certain share she agrees to join the operation to sell him. So an unusual trinity with a child in their arms goes on a trip to Korea in a battered minibus. At some point, they are joined by seven-year-old Hae-jin (Lim Seung-soo), who escaped from the orphanage where Dong-soo grew up, and there are already five of them. Hot on their heels are detectives hoping to catch child traffickers in the act of making a deal, as well as mediocre neighborhood gangsters who are indebted to Sang Hyun. The murder that took place in Busan on that very rainy night is somehow connected with all this.

None of the heroes of “Mediators” is not only flawless, you can’t even call them good people. However, the director looks at them with sympathetic curiosity, neither justifying nor condemning.

None of the characters in “The Brokers” is not only flawless, they can’t even be called good people – least of all Sang-hyun, whom Song Kang-ho shows as funny, pathetic, dishonest, but at the same time not without a slightly ridiculous charm. However, the director looks at all of them – from criminals with their eternal excuses, and at the police with their moral superiority that threatens to turn into emotional blindness, and at the confused So-yang – with sympathetic curiosity, without justifying or condemning, just showing and telling, How did they get to this life? There is no special social criticism in the film either: of course, starting from what is happening in it, one can speculate about how imperfect the adoption system is, and whether baby boxes are a salvation for women and children or only create new problems. But all this remains on the periphery of the plot, in the center of which are little people with their little stories, gradually becoming a family that none of them, except for Hae-jin, who has not yet lost his childish optimism and faith in the best, no longer hoped to find.