The writer-director Lee Chang-dong belongs to a rare breed of filmmakers who have never made anything less than a great movie. Not surprisingly, there's sometimes a long wait between those movies: It's been eight years since his previous work, the chilly psychological thriller Burning.
It's wonderful to have him back with a new film, Possible Love, which tells a story that's been weighing on him for some time. It was inspired by an incident from 2009, when a car factory in Korea laid off one-third of its workforce. The metal workers' union organized a strike, which was brutally shut down by police. Many of the workers subsequently took their own lives.
The film, which director Lee co-wrote with Oh Jung-mi, follows a married couple two years after a similar tragedy shook their small industrial town. Sul Kyung-gu plays a welder named Ho-seok, one of many who were laid off from a factory due to a major restructuring.
Ho-seok now has another metalworking job elsewhere, but the pain of his termination still lingers, and he's become an alcoholic. His wife, Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon, works at a company that manufactures face masks. She's the warm-spirited glue holding the family together; they also have a young son.
Early on, the couple meets a woman named Ye-ji, an aspiring filmmaker who's shooting a documentary about the layoffs. Ye-ji wants them both to appear in the film, but only Mi-ok is game to be interviewed. She reveals a lot about her past on camera: We see flashbacks of her with her mom, who felt ashamed and even angry about their working-class roots. We also see the thrilling day that she and Ho-seok first met, as teenagers.
Ye-ji shares a bit about herself, too, including how she met her very handsome, very rich hedge-fund-investor-type husband. But even as the two women forge a friendship, the flow of information here is largely a one-way street. The film never lets us forget that their bond is governed by clear differences of class, wealth and power. Ye-ji's kindness, genuine as it seems, is conditioned on Mi-ok's ongoing participation in her project.
At times, Possible Love can play like a treatise on documentary ethics. But while Ye-ji's methods certainly warrant critique, director Lee sharply implicates himself as well. His gently handheld camerawork sometimes blurs into Ye-ji's footage, making it hard to tell whose perspective we're seeing. Lee seems to be acknowledging that fictional and nonfictional storytelling both have their manipulations, and he's determined to do right by the real events and real issues that he draws on. Possible Love itself is opening the same month that its distributor, Netflix, laid off a staggering 6% of its global workforce.
There's a documentary-like quality to some of the film's most moving moments, which take place at a group-counseling session for laid-off workers and their spouses. We hear them speak about the joyous early days of the strike, the sense of solidarity that they experienced before it was shut down. Lee's earlier films, like Oasis and Peppermint Candy, have often portrayed misfits and outcasts. In Possible Love, he explores a different kind of alienation, the kind that results from the rupture of a once-great community.
Since its premiere at festivals earlier this fall, Possible Love has sparked a lot of comparisons to Parasite, another class-conscious Korean drama about two families. Cho Yeo-jeong, who played the rich wife in Parasite, is equally terrific as Ye-ji, the rich wife in this film. Yet the two movies are more different than they are similar. Where Parasite was a virtuoso Hitchcockian thriller, Possible Love has an almost novelistic richness and depth of character. It also has four of the year's best performances.
As Ye-ji's husband, Zo In-sung is such a smooth mix of condescension and charm that you might not recognize him from the recent down-and-dirty monster movie Hope. And then there are the leads, Sul and Jeon, both of whom have done some of their best work in Lee's previous films, and who do some of their best work again here. As the depressed and drunken Ho-seok, Sul gives a quietly implosive, deeply mysterious performance; he keeps revealing layers of himself through the final moments.
As for his wife, Mi-ok, she's simply one of the most memorably complex characters you'll see in a movie this year. Remarkably, she hasn't given in to despair. She meets every challenge with a playful sense of mischief, and though she often gets exasperated with her husband, even the way she chides him makes clear the depths of their connection. The title of Possible Love asks whether love can survive life's difficulties. For all their deeply human foibles, Ho-seok and Mi-ok answer that question with a resounding yes.
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