Adoption broker, journey to find adoptive parents… draw another family

What kind of movie is ‘The Broker’ or ‘The decision to break up’
Broker Kang-ho Song, anguish between good and evil… Delicately digesting the figure of protecting humanity
‘I’m going to break up… ‘ Detective – Draw a widow ‘attraction’… Cannes Palme d’Or, ‘Triangle of Sorrow’
The movie ‘The Broker’ starring Song Kang-ho, which captured the 75th Cannes Film Festival, and ‘The Decision to Break Up’, directed by Park Chan-wook, will be released in Korea on the 8th and 29th of next month, respectively.

‘The Broker’, which gave actor Song Kang-ho the Best Actor Award, is the first Korean film directed by Japanese master Hirokazu Koreeda, who won the Palme d’Or for ‘A Family’ in 2018. Song Kang-ho takes on the role of Sang-hyeon, a broker who steals abandoned babies from baby boxes and sells them to a couple in need. The story begins when Sang-hyeon brings the abandoned baby Woo-seong to the baby box, and her mother So-yeong (Lee Ji-eun) finds out about it. They adopt a child to good parents and accompany them on the journey to earn money, exchanging small favors and becoming another family. Song Kang-ho is evaluated for delicately portraying the role of Sang-hyeon, who struggles at the boundary between good and evil and does not lose his human side.

‘Decision to break up’, which gave director Park the best director award, is a melodrama drama. It is the story of homicide detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), who puts Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the wife of a man who died after falling off a cliff, as a suspect, and falls for each other. Director Park, who is called the ‘genius of mise-en-scène’, exquisitely expressed the psychology of a person who deepens and moves away by repeatedly using zoom-in and zoom-out without provocative scenes such as bed scenes. Art director Ryu Seong-hee, who won the Best Art Award at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival for ‘The Handmaiden’, spatially expanded the characters’ emotions by arranging the shapes of mountains and seas twisting and tumbling throughout the space where the two characters reside. This is the reason why Screen International, a British film magazine, praised it as “a very visually beautiful film”.

The Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival went to Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s ‘Triangle of Sadness’. The Grand Jury Prize was jointly awarded to Belgian director Lucas Dont’s ‘Close’ and French director Claire Denis’s ‘Star at Noon’.

Reporter Lee So-yeon always99@donga.com