The Mother in Kore-eda's Broker: Striking New Reverberations in the Korean Context

Abstract:

This article's interest in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker (2022) is twofold. First, it analyzes the visual text to unwrap the ideas of conventionality that are subtly debunked in the making of an unconventional family, amidst which it analyzes the mother character to be a central force of redemption and union. Ultimately, it argues the role of motherhood in this new family unit to be that of an imaginary and ideological vessel. Second, it positions this idea against the history of Korean cinema, where decades of films have similarly glorified motherhood as an unconditional love that redeems. Yet Kore-eda's radical image of a teenage sex worker as the bearer of this ideology simultaneously resonates with a different strand of Korean films: half-commercial half-arthouse films from the mid-1990s and 2000s known as "high-quality films." Motherhood is one of two connections that can be drawn between Broker and high-quality films. While the mother aligns with the female precedents of these films by together pushing the boundaries of the Korean cinematic mother, her pivotal role in the making of a new kind of family also connects to depictions of "alternative families." Such reverberations are meaningful not only in allowing Broker to be positioned within the context of Korean film history as a story that interlaces with the ideas of Korean films despite being made by a non-Korean auteur, but also in illuminating the trans- and multi-national nature of (art) films today, where the lowering of the national boundaries surrounding auteurs are leading to multi-contextual films.