However, this time her confidence leads to a production with characters that she clearly loves but almost too much in that she doesn’t give them quite enough to do to connect to an audience. The director of the excellent “ Eden,” “ Things to Come,” and “ Bergman Island,” one of my favorite films of last year, has an elegance of character, an ability to spend time with well-drawn, believable people without forcing them into contrived melodrama. It takes a truly confident filmmaker to write and direct a character study that feels as low stakes as Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning,” which premiered at Cannes before Toronto and an upcoming theatrical release. I’ve long believed that people are heavily defined by who they know-I’m not sure any filmmaker captures this better than Kore-eda. He’s so fascinated not just by people as individuals moving through the world but how we shape each other, often through these impossible families. They’re often just taking the better fork in the difficult road. Kore-eda understands that people who do the unimaginable often found themselves at those decisions through a life path that they never planned out. Those happy coincidences are forgivable because we've come to truly like these indisputably amoral people who are willing to sell babies to the highest bidder. It’s in the fact that he never talks down to his characters or uses them in a way that feels manipulative, allowing the emotion of his dramas to build instead of forcing it on the narrative, even if it's admittedly hard to believe that all the pieces would fall into place like they do in the final act here. It’s in the way that Dong-soo warms to So-young or how the writer/director shapes her character’s journey from a woman who believes she has no options or friends to someone who discovers new avenues of strength. There’s an understated grace in Kore-eda’s films that can be hard to put your finger on. It’s complicated.Īnd yet it’s also deeply uncomplicated. When So-young returns the next day to reclaim her baby, as she’s allowed to do, everything collapses, and she ends up on a strange road trip with Dong-soo, Sang-hyun, and another orphan child just trying to find a family of his own. On the other side are the two cops outside who are watching this all go down: Ji-Sun (Bae Doona) and her new partner ( Lee Joo-young), who are trying to break this trafficking ring. They have a deal-Dong-soo erases the surveillance footage and the pair traffic the babies that are left at the church, selling them to bidders who are trying to bypass the adoption system. On one side is Dong-soo, who works at the Busan Family Church that’s supposed to take in the newborn, and his business partner Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho of “ Parasite,” who won an acting award for his work here at Cannes). She has no idea that she’s about to be thrust into a dynamic between two pairs on the opposite side of the law. “Broker” starts with So-young (the breathtakingly great Lee Ji-eun, giving one of my favorite performances of the year) making the impossible choice to leave her newborn baby at a church drop box in the middle of night. “This car is filled with liars,” says Dong-soo ( Gang Dong-won), and he’s not wrong. And that love keeps us engaged in their stories. His latest is one of his most remarkable tonal accomplishments in that it’s a film about people that the viewer is inherently likely to judge as reprehensible and yet he finds a way to make their decisions feel genuine and even understandable. He is one of our most empathetic filmmakers, someone who never judges his characters, and presents their flaws as not only genuine but relatable. This masterful drama has Kore-eda’s almost impossible grace and empathy in every scene, further exemplifying his ability to tell emotionally raw stories without devolving into melodrama. Other than the fact that it’s set in South Korea instead of Kore-eda’s home country of Japan, people familiar with his filmography might be able to guess that “Broker” was his work (or at least heavily influenced by it) even if they didn’t see his name on the credits. Hirokazu Kore-eda has made a number of films about the malleability of the word “family.” He’s fascinated by human connection through masterful dramas like “ Nobody Knows,” “ After the Storm,” “ Shoplifters,” and more. Atext reviews full#One of the true joys of TIFF is being able to catch up on the films that originally premiered at Cannes, like “ Moonage Daydream,” “ Decision to Leave,” and “Triangle of Sadness.” Those were (or will be) covered in full here, but I wanted to share some thoughts on a pair of very different dramas that we’ll hit in full further down the road, including one of my favorite films of the year.
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