Thank you for being born

A thermonuclear ethical debate swaddled in a family road-trip comedy. Daniel Kim reviews Broker.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

Three people, one carrying a baby, stand on a dock side at a harbour

The brokers await a meeting with prospective buyers.

In 2009, a Korean pastor at Jusarang Community Church installed a small, two-way, hatch on the wall of his church. One way opened out onto the street where mothers could place unwanted babies anonymously and inconspicuously. On the other side, the child would be taken into a nursery, cared for, and put up for adoption. By 2019, over 1,500 babies were left in this ‘Baby Box’ and the scheme has spread out across Korea and other surrounding countries. Since then, it has continually raised challenging ethical, pragmatic, and social questions in the media. What about the legality and safeguarding of this scheme? What about the possibility of corruption and bad actors? Does it incentivise irresponsible motherhood? Is it better to abandon a baby than to abort it? Least to say, the topic is one that spins off into many controversial and toe-curling conversations.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker is a film that is equally about all of these things, and also none of them. After a young woman decides to abandon her newborn child at a Baby Box she discovers that a pair of criminal ‘brokers’ are at work who take these children and sells them to childless parents. She decides to join them on the search for the right ‘customers’.

If the premise conjures up images of a grim existential drama, you would be mistaken. If I were to describe this movie in two words, it would be ‘intimate’ and ‘humane’. It is not a moralising hit-you-over-the-head polemic. Instead, it is a thermonuclear ethical debate swaddled up in a warm, slice-of-life, road-trip comedy. Yet it manages to do this without feeling contrived or losing the empathetic depth required to do the topic justice. It humanises the ethics and portrays them in a heartwarming yet unsentimental narrative. For this alone, the writer-director Kore-eda deserves his plaudits. Rarely does the film feel heavy.

Broker trailer

The tone of the film is measured and meditative without dragging. The lingering and deliberate cinematography doesn’t overstay its welcome and contributes to the calming, road-trip atmosphere of the film. There are some particularly memorable compositions during key dialogue scenes that will leave an impression - The Ferris Wheel. You’ll know what I mean.

Set in predominantly rural coastal towns, the camera writes a subtle love letter to the South Korean coast. And at a time when the films that manage to gain wider Western viewership are heavy, Seoul-centric dramas, it is refreshing to see a film that points the camera to the rural coastline and celebrates its understated but lived-in beauty. In this way, the Japanese influences of the director shine through.

The performances are strong all around. The ever-reliable Song Kang-ho of Parasite brings in a reserved yet dialled-in performance as a good-natured yet morally dubious broker which is worthy of his Best Actor award at Cannes 2022. Yet Ji-eun Lee’s performance deserves particular attention. Playing the mother, she inhabits the emotional core of the film with convincing depth and complexity. This is particularly impressive given that it is a debut performance in a feature film. The writing is gently comedic and delightful while being doggedly committed to portraying its characters as they truly are - in shades of grey and emotional complexity. Tackling such a thorny issue would have run the risk of characters becoming mere caricatures in the hands of a less sensitive screenwriter.

To the question, what am I worth if I was abandoned, orphaned, divorced, poor, morally compromised, or whatever else? the film responds thank you for being born.

The film does not seek to paint ethics in black and white clarity, resisting any effort to politicise or polemicise. Despite this, the core of the film is a celebration of life, an exploration of the meaning of family, and an unflinching affirmation of the inviolable value of the human individual. To the question, what am I worth if I was abandoned, orphaned, divorced, poor, morally compromised, or whatever else? the film responds: thank you for being born.

From a Christian perspective, this was refreshing. Rarely does a film portray human complexity without cynicism. The ‘ethics of Life’ has made its foray into the cinema scene several times in the last few years including Ozan’s drama exploring euthanasia, Everything Went Fine (2021), or the more widely known Me Before You back in 2016 delving into similar waters. They bring with them their own nuanced perspectives, but they trend towards the possibility of death being more desirable than life. Into this conversation, Broker provides an uncomfortable yet much-needed counterpoint in which life wins. The film doesn’t glorify or heroise the Church's efforts, playing only a minor background element. Instead, it is the story of complicated, broken people stumbling through the best they can.

Broker debuted in Cannes 2022, releasing in South Korean cinemas in June, but has only just made it into cinemas in the UK. It will probably not gain wider cinema openings like Parasite did, but if you have a chance to watch it at your local independent cinema, you are in for a heartwarming, meditative, and intimate experience, dripping with humanity.

The real Baby Box

Review

Art

Culture

26 July 2024

5 min read

Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d

Artist Richard Kenton Webb converses with the blind poet in his former home.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white illustration shows a man holding a walk stick standing among tomb-like structures.

The blind poet. Charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Richard Kenton Webb.

‘Waiting to Speak to Milton’ shows the artist Richard Kenton Webb on a rain-swept night waiting in a valley for a car whose headlights can just be seen at the crest of the hill. For this image he has imagined himself waiting for a lift from John Milton to discuss the poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. As the opening image to Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles it is appropriately positioned in the porch by which visitors enter the cottage.

This image of light appearing in the dark night of the soul symbolises the beginning of Webb’s journey with Milton and his late poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. This has been a 10-year journey that Webb began following a conversation with his son in front of John Martin’s mezzotints for Paradise Lost at the Tate. Following on from his son’s encouragement to begin work, over that period, Webb says Milton has been a companion like Virgil to Dante guiding him through the narrative of his own life including the dark nights of redundancy and lockdown. The result has been 128 drawings, 40 paintings and 12 relief prints forming A Conversation with Milton’s Paradise Lost, a commission of 12 drawings in response to Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas, for the Milton Society of America, and the 13 drawings forming this exhibition, A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes.

Milton proved an effective companion because he, too, had passed through his own dark night of the soul. He arrived in Chalfont St Giles to escape the Great Plague of 1665 after the Republican cause to which he had dedicated more than a decade of his life - being Oliver Cromwell’s unofficial spin doctor - had collapsed around him with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. He had been lucky to escape with his life following imprisonment and the banning of his books. In addition, he had lost his sight, his beloved second wife, much of his money and all of his influence.

Despite these traumas, Milton was able to express his love for his Creator wonderfully in Paradise Lost, which was completed at the cottage in Chalfont St Giles, and Paradise Regain’d, which was inspired whilst there. In both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton deploys his rich verses and visions of spirituality and the forces of good and evil to reflect on the Restoration of the Monarchy and the loss of the English republic, doing so by means of Biblical stories concerning Jesus and Samson.

Browse Webb's exhibition

A black and white illustration show a person crouching in the corner and lifting as it was a stage drape.

Modes of Apprehension by Richard Kenton Webb – charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Inside a history cottage, black and white illustrations hang on the wall.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

A black and white illustration shows a two people close together on a pinnacle.

The Pinnacle by Richard Kenton Webb - charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

In Webb’s view, “Paradise Regain’d is about overcoming impossible situations” while, in Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Redeemer shows “Samson, the blind and foolish man”, “that we can always find hope in our living God even when society does not”. These poems moved Webb out of despair to discover hope because he knew they were heading towards redemption. As a result, he sees Milton as “a great English poet who gives hope, which in itself is a creative act for these difficult times”.

Although the story of Samson pre-dates that of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, Webb’s painting series begins with images inspired by Paradise Regain’d, just as Samson Agonistes followed Paradise Regain’d when both were jointly published in 1671, because Jesus’ resistance of temptation ultimately redeems those, like Samson and Adam and Eve, who were unable to resist.

These are images set against a dark background with the exception of the final Paradise Regain’d image with its white sky depicting a paradise within as Jesus has overcome temptation, is in full communion with God and is about to begin his ministry by calling his first disciples. The images move from the trauma and test of temptation – whether involving hunger, greed, lust, threat, pride or ambition – to a calmness of mind that is equipoise and liberation and which also enables the destruction of false temples.

They are images in which movement is arrested in still moments which form theatrical tableaux. These, like medieval and early Tudor morality plays, involve the viewer in an epic struggle between good and evil, involving temptation, fall and redemption. Webb’s use of charcoal and white chalk on paper emphasises the binary nature of this struggle. Being formed of charcoal and chalk, despite his use of contemporary equivalents for the temptations, the look and feel of Webb’s images also accords well with their exhibition setting, in rooms of low ceilings, uneven white walls, dark beams and furniture.

Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own.

As Paradise Lost was the first illustrated poem in the English language, Milton’s poetry has, as Kelly O’Reilly, Director of Milton’s Cottage, has noted “inspired many of our greatest artists, from Blake to Turner, Dore to Dali”. Webb, who consciously works in the continuing tradition of Blake’s visionary art, is extending the tradition of illustrating Milton’s poems. It is appropriate, then, that, by exhibiting these drawings in Milton’s Cottage, they are placed alongside examples of illustrated editions of the poems, plus other paintings and prints relating to Milton.

Milton’s works are not only a repository of rich verse, which also gifted over 600 new words to the English language, but are also a conversation with scripture, its stories and their interpretation, plus the social and political ramifications of the Reformation in the British Isles. Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own and linking those powerfully to the themes of Milton’s poems.

The key image, in this regard, is the first in the Paradise Regain’d series (‘Modes of Apprehension’), which sees Jesus in the wilderness turning up the corner of the wilderness backdrop, as in a theatre, to reveal another dimension or reality to existence and experience behind it. Hope is discovered in the midst of desolation, resilience found in the face of temptation. In these ways, Webb achieves his own hope for these works, that, “by responding to Milton’s universal themes of creation, destruction, temptation, love and loss”, he “can help new audiences find fresh ways to engage in Milton’s legacy”.

A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Cottage, 3 July – 8 September 2024.

Visit the exhibition web site.