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Broker

A shaggy narrative about imminent despair
Madman Entertainment
by
ABR Arts 27 March 2023

Broker

A shaggy narrative about imminent despair
Madman Entertainment
by
ABR Arts 27 March 2023
Lee Ji Eun as So-young (photograph courtesy of Madman)
Lee Ji Eun as So-young (photograph courtesy of Madman)

It’s drizzling when an Aimee Mann song plays in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker. You know the one: ‘Wise Up’, the scabrous number that soundtracks a famous sequence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), whose central cast – united by various machinations of fate – sing along in some kind of deranged processional, each character downcast and seeking salvation in Mann’s lyrics. None appears; the track literally ends with the words ‘give up’. But Mann’s vocals convey something different. Her falsetto is glassy, transportive: peering into a vertiginous abyss and resisting the temptation of freefall, if only for a second.