Screened in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Broker” is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s second non-Japanese-language feature. His first was “The Truth” (2019), a French- and English-language drama starring Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche as a quarreling mother and daughter.
Based on an original script by the director and shot in South Korea with South Korean actors, “Broker” is a more comfortable cultural fit, though it is still very much a Kore-eda film, with more of his incisive, impactful musings on the meaning of family.
One comparison is “Shoplifters,” Kore-eda’s 2018 Cannes Palme d’Or winner about an ersatz family of small-time crooks. In the new film, the two main protagonists — brokers who illegally acquire infants for adoption — also form family-like ties with a young woman and her baby.