THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
At the age of 60 and with fifteen films to his credit, the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda has for several years bent his rather dark work, tormented by the question of family and filiation, towards comedy, while moving away from Japan. This small internal revolution led him to an excursion to France (The truth, 2019), where he probes the complicated reunion between an actress mother and her screenwriter daughter (Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche); then today in Korea, where his film takes the form, starting from the question of children abandoned at their birth, of a colorful road-movie, built around the formidable actor, Song Kang-ho, familiar in particular with the cinema of Bong Joon-ho.
This one interprets the role of a rather cool dry-cleaner’s employee, kind shaggy in Hawaiian shirts. To put butter in the spinach, he got in touch with one of the employees of a Korean church, himself abandoned in his childhood, in charge of recovering the infants deposited by mothers in difficulty in a “baby box » provided for this purpose. The young man entertains some of them, whom the owner of the dry cleaners, under the moral pretext of a double good deed to be accomplished, sells to desperate parents who cannot have children. So that’s what happens at the beginning of the film on a rainy night, when a young mother drops off her infant without even leaving his identity.
Stepfamily
But what should only be one more formality for the two traffickers will turn this time into a chase between various protagonists with non-converging interests, which the scenario likes to multiply like bread without getting too embarrassed. of likelihood. So enter the round of this road movie in a dilapidated van: a nice little orphan who hid in the trunk during the passage of the two friends in an orphanage; the mother of the infant who finally found them; two policewomen tailing her after she kills her child’s father for a good reason; the wife of this dirty individual who wants to raise the child of her ex-husband; mobsters who are chasing the indebted laundry boss up to his neck.
The whole, conducted in a fairly good-natured way, gives a film that is rather pleasant to follow, provider of sometimes quite funny situations, but which struggles to put its staging at the height of its subject and the issues addressed by the film. So, for example, in a particularly light, not to say far-fetched, and at the same time fairly predictable way, the little group of fugitives – the mother, the infant and the two philanthropic crooks – ends up forming a sort of blended family under the pressure of events. Song Kang-ho, particularly favored by the script, turns out to be almost the only one to pull out of the game in this eccentric story and holds this melodrama, repainted in the colors of a feel good movieon his shoulders.
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