Hirokazu Kore-eda can declare to be the best dwelling Japanese movie director, whose household dramas have marked him out because the inheritor to Ozu (though in an interview with me he stated he most well-liked to be in contrast with Mikio Naruse). His work, together with the Palme-winning Shoplifters (2018) is rightly revered. However he has all the time had a candy tooth for whimsy and sentimentality, which I assumed was on show in his a lot admired baby-swap drama Like Father Like Son (2013).
Now he has given us a sudsy road-movie heartwarmer set in Korea and impressed by the Korean phenomenon of “baby boxes” put out by church buildings for undesirable newborns. However the film is basically foolish, with tiringly shallow characterisation and broad streaks of crime-drama intrigue, which solely underline the truth that not a single phrase of it’s actually plausible.
Korean actor Tune Kang-ho (famed for starring in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite) performs Sang-hyeon, a volunteer at a neighborhood church that has a “child field”. However he’s operating a “dealer” rip-off: sometimes he steals a new child for himself – erasing the church’s CCTV footage that show a child was left there – and presents it on the market on the adoption black market, with potential {couples} lined up by his companion Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), a former orphanage inhabitant with entry to details about potential adopters who need newborns fairly than institutionalised toddlers. However their lives are made extra difficult when younger mom So-young (Lee Ji-eun), whose undesirable child is taken and supplied up on the market by these two tricksters, confronts them and as an alternative of telling the police, insists on coming with them on their zany road-trip to interview potential dad and mom. On their path are a few cops, performed by Bae Doona and Lee Joo-young.
After all, in the true world, the folks operating such a nauseating rip-off could be creepy and loathsome people. And let’s say they have been claiming – as these two fictional characters are – that they have been doing the world a service by sidestepping paperwork and dreary orphanage care by getting the infants shortly to adoptive dad and mom and furthermore handing over many of the price to the mom, then this, too, could be extremely suspect and naive. What kind of folks may wish to pay high greenback for a child?
However the movie presents the 2 as simply lovable, flawed guys who’re romantics at coronary heart: powerful cookie So-young even tells goofy younger Dong-so that he must be extra hard-hearted as a result of candy guys like him get eaten alive. The criminality of the proceedings is assigned to the mom, who seems to have a shadier background than we at first assume. After all, if anybody can promote such a dodgy premise it’s that fantastic actor, Tune Kang-ho, however his air of hangdog everyman decency can’t resolve the issues of naivety, implausibility and the sugary style. It’s a uncommon miss for Kore-eda.
