Boxing Clever

Song Kang-ho came to international prominence in Parasite, the South Korean movie which scooped 2020’s Best Picture Oscar. James Mottram speaks to this admirably modest actor about his contentious new film which revolves around the divisive issue of ‘baby boxes’

In Asian cinema terms, Broker is what you might call a clash of the heavyweights. Behind the camera is Kore-eda Hirokazu, esteemed Japanese director of Nobody Knows and the Cannes-winning Shoplifters. In front, it’s Song Kang-ho, the Korean actor who became an international superstar after his lead turn in Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar darling Parasite, having previously starred in 2002 thriller SympathyForMrVengeance and 2016 action drama TheAgeOfShadows. The two met 15 years ago, at the Busan International Film Festival. ‘Surprisingly, he knew of me and said he liked the works I had appeared in,’ says Song, modestly.

It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. After hanging out in Tokyo during 2016, Kore-eda proposed a potential collaboration, with Song playing a priest ‘who was also a baby broker’, the director notes, when we sit down for a chat in Cannes. Wait a minute . . . a what? Set in Korea, Broker deals with the very thorny issues of ‘baby boxes’: a way of leaving unwanted children anonymously. When Kore-eda was researching his 2013 adoption drama Like Father Like Son, he discovered there was one in Japan; then he learned there were far more in Korea.

Seen as a last resort for desperate parents, these ‘baby boxes’ (which can literally be hatches in the wall) are usually connected to churches, and employees work around the clock to ensure that infants are immediately retrieved. Song knew of the phenomenon, but it’s clearly a practice that’s frowned upon by some in Korean society. ‘It is a facility that we are aware of but do not wish to easily reveal,’ Song admits. ‘It’s for people in special circumstances to use in order to resolve those circumstances.’

As Kore-eda puts it, ‘the idea of the baby box in Japan and Korea is still quite divisive. There are people who say that baby boxes are good because they save lives. There are others who say that it encourages women to discard their children. So, it’s a negative presence. I wanted to show that life is a blessing and to affirm the lives of these children.’ Song, however, had his doubts. ‘I did not think it would be easy to tell this story given the painful theme.’

Trust in the creator, perhaps. Broker is another typically nuanced work from Kore-eda, who makes light of coming into Korea to shoot for the first time in his career. In the film, Song and fellow Korean Gang Dong-won (who you may recognise from zombie thriller Peninsula) play, respectively, Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo, two church volunteers who receive infants via the baby boxes before secretly selling them on the black market. Then they meet So-young (Lee Ji-eun), a mother who initially abandons her baby at the church.

‘All of them have painful corners to their lives,’ says Song. ‘They hide them or do not reveal them. Their lives have not been kind to them, to the degree where it is impossible to judge what is good or bad, and they are overwhelmed.’ While that might be a kind assessment, the truth is Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo are traffickers, even if they believe they’re giving these abandoned infants a better chance at a happy life.

When they meet So-young, the trio go on a journey to find suitable parents for her baby, with a view to splitting the profits. Joining them is a seven-year-old orphan Hae-jin, creating a strange surrogate family that will feel familiar to anyone who has seen Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, which also featured a makeshift clan. ‘I want to show that there are different types of families,’ claims the director, noting he wants to re-evaluate the idea ‘that families can only be formed by people who are connected by blood.’

Song, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his nuanced performance, got to reconnect with ‘family’ members on Broker too; not least cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (‘a true artist’) who previously shot Parasite. He remembers one scene when the gang pile into the van at a car wash, the sunlight glinting off So-young’s face. ‘When I watched the film, I thought, isn’t the sunshine itself a handful of hope that the film strives for? He put a lot of effort into capturing the sunshine, a single scene that, in a surprising way, penetrates throughout the film and instils itself to the audience.’

Maybe this is why Broker doesn’t feel like a seedy portrait of scurrilous, self-interested people. Rather, there’s a tenderness to this story of lost souls, characterised by the use of Aimee Mann’s melancholic ‘Wise Up’ on the soundtrack (a song umbilically linked to Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful Magnolia). Kore-eda’s characters are a group of dreamers too, not least the chatty youngster Hae-jin, who fantasises about playing professional football (even referencing Korean-born Tottenham Hotspur star, Son Heung-min).

To some, Kore-eda might now seem like an honorary Korean, joining the country that brought us Parasite, Squid Game and the like. But what does Song think? Has the filmmaker managed to imprint his personality on South Korean cinema? ‘You could say it was the opposite case,’ he answers, surprisingly. ‘Of course, director Kore-eda gave another moving heartfelt film to Korean cinema but also, on the other hand, I wonder if Japanese cinema was stimulated in a refreshing way.’ Whatever the case, he seems delighted by the experience. ‘It was very touching that a master Japanese director came to Korea to shoot a film.’

Broker is in cinemas from Friday 24 February.