Song Kang-ho in Broker.Courtesy of Elevation Pictures
If Korean cinema has a world ambassador, it just might be Song Kang-ho.
The 55-year-old actor has been a staple of the country’s film industry for more than a quarter century, familiar to adventurous global audiences who have followed the works of the country’s leading auteurs: Hong Sang-soo (The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well), Park Chan-wook (Joint Security Area, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), and Song’s best-known collaborator, Bong Joon-ho, who has partnered with the actor four times, including on the Oscar-winning thriller Parasite.
A leading man with character-actor stamina and an affinity for ragged working-class anti-heroes, Song is now enjoying something of a genuine breakthrough moment, riding the waves of excitement that greeted 2019′s Parasite to push his name just outside confines of art house market.
This month, the actor is starring in Broker, a dramedy from acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (the Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters) whose world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this past spring helped earn Song the most prestigious acting prize around: the fest’s best actor award, making the star the first Korean man to nab the honour. (Actress Jeon Do Yeon became the first Korean performer to win a Cannes acting award in 2007, for her turn in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, which co-starred, you guessed it, Song.)
In Kore-eda’s sweet, slow-burn film – whose focus on makeshift families operating just outside the law recalls the thematic core of Shoplifters – Song plays Sang-hyeon, a small-time crook who, along with his friend Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), steals babies abandoned by their mothers in a church “baby box,” and sells them to desperate couples unable to conceive on their own. That might sound like a horrifyingly dark concept for what turns out to be a road-tripping dramedy, yet thanks to Kore-eda’s light touch and Song’s sturdy-yet-shifty performance, Broker is more sentimental than severe. Not to mention it offers Song another complicated character to add to his filmography of layered anti-heroes.
“Whether it’s working with Bong or with Kore-eda, these are directors who enjoy looking at men in dilemmas, characters who are neither good nor bad, but just realistic because as humans, we all deal with problems in our own ways,” Song says through an interpreter during an interview at this past September’s Toronto International Film Festival. “These are the kinds of movies I’m attracted to.”
It helps that the minute Song appears on-screen, his strong jaw and coolly subdued vibe give off an instant air of ambiguity, mystery, even seduction. It is the kind of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mutable presence that makes him such a natural fit for the cinema of Bong, perhaps the most unpredictable filmmaker working today. Together, the pair have injected surprises into well-worn genres, from the monster movie (Host) to the detective thriller (Memories of Murder) and the postapocalypse thriller (Snowpiercer). Asked, though, how the global sensation that was Parasite might have changed the phone calls and scripts that come his way, Song insists that, as an actor, he is merely one cog in the machine.
“Bong and I have been working together for 20 years, and we’re not only comrades but friends. So I’ve been able to watch his own evolution, and Parasite was a project where we got to see so much growth,” Song says. “It is more his evolution than mine. I’m just a small part of it.”
Nevertheless, there is little question that Parasite helped connect the dots of Broker: It takes something special for a Japanese director such as Kore-eda to challenge himself to film in an entirely new language on the allure of his leading man.
“Of course we speak in different languages, so working with him had differences, but it was not as difficult as you might expect,” Song says. “I signed on to the film because it’s an extension of Kore-eda’s exploration of family, but offering a new perspective, which is attractive as an actor.”
Song got his start on the stage – “I have no desire to go back, because it’s too exhausting,” he says with a laugh – and those live-energy chops are evident in every one of the actor’s on-screen performances. Especially toward the end of Broker, where Sang-hyeon’s criminal motivations are peeled back to showcase a man haunted by a past mistake he has no hopes of rectifying. It is a performance both so honed and natural that it is easy to see why the Cannes jury was moved. As to whether the honour has instantly shifted his stock as an actor, Song is as demur as his on-screen creations are electric.
“The Korean press is interested in this a lot, but I don’t think there is a ‘before’ or ‘after’ from an award,” he says. “Acting is different from sports in that we have a much longer career. It is more about the process than the result of these big awards. While it’s a big point in the timeline of my career, I don’t think it will result in a lot of big changes.”
Perhaps, though there is something about Song’s career arc that resonates – especially, or perhaps just simply crassly, because his TIFF visit coincides with the weekend that another leading light of Korean entertainment, Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae, triumphed at the Emmy Awards and made history.
“Koreans doing well on the international stage is definitely something to be celebrated, but it’s not something that will be able to persist forever,” Song says. “It cannot go on and on. Many other countries are coming up with new stories worth paying attention to, and globally it’s important for everyone to encourage one another to tell better stories. It’s a phenomenon, but it’s not necessarily permanent.”
For fans old and new of Song, though, let’s hope that his ascent remains more a phenomenon with no immediate end point.
Broker opens in select Canadian theatres Dec. 30
Barry Hertz