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Lee Chang-dong’s delicate yet sturdy drama Possible Love—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival, hitting theaters Oct. 23 and streaming on Netflix Nov. 6—is a movie about figuring out how to function in the world. If that description seems confoundingly vague, Lee’s movie is not. It shows us a world where people feel lost after losing their livelihood, where individuals strive to connect with others despite differences of class and temperament, where tenderness ultimately has more power than arrogance. It’s a movie with a gentle, generous spirit.
Lee opens the picture with a funeral, or, rather, a small family piling into their car to get to the funeral venue. Wife and mother Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) wonders if she’s wearing the right dress, and the shoes she has chosen, a pair she hasn’t worn in a long time, are already pinching her feet. Her husband, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), says little—so little that it’s clear he’s filled with dread over whatever awaits him at this upcoming, obviously unhappy social event. Their extremely quiet young son (Jung Seop) sits in the back seat, amusing himself by dangling an empty chip bag out the window like a windsock. “It’s flying,” he says, just before letting it go—he’s not the only one feeling the oppressiveness of that car ride.
It’s never expressly spelled out who this funeral is for, but we can intuit that it’s one of Ho-seok’s former work colleagues. It turns out that Ho-seok is one of many workers who not so long ago lost his job at a large corporation, SP, and he hasn’t yet recovered, either financially or emotionally. Mi-ok is doing the best she can—she holds down a menial factory job—but her husband’s depression and excessive drinking is getting to her. By chance, in the funeral home parking lot, she meets a handsome stranger, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), who moves his very expensive car when Mi-ok believes her wedding ring, having slipped off her finger, has rolled beneath it. It turns out that Sang-woo’s wife, Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-Jong), is making a documentary about, as she puts it, “the personal lives of laborers.” Ye-ji is thrilled to have found Mi-ok and Ho-seok as subjects—she’s particularly interested in the melancholic Ho-seok, who, she believes, could be the dramatic key her project. But she and Mi-ok also genuinely like each other and strike up a friendship. Possible Love traces the tangled dynamics between these four characters, while also flirting with uncomfortable questions about the moral quandaries that can arise in any filmmaker-subject relationship.
Zo In-sung as Sang-woo, Jeon Do-yeon as Mi-ok Courtesy of Netflix
Mostly, though, Possible Love traces the ways people come to care for one another, either platonically or romantically. Ye-ji and Mi-ok quickly come to think of themselves as sisters. Though Ye-ji has married well, she doesn’t come from a privileged family—her father ran a dry-cleaning establishment—and she has some sense of Mi-ok’s money worries and feelings of insecurity. At an early meeting, where Ye-ji outlines the aim of her proposed documentary to Mi-ok, she leaves the table momentarily, and Mi-ok snaps a picture of the elegant backpack she’s left behind. Then she uses a Google-image search to find out the brand. It’s made by Loro Piana, and quite obviously beyond Mi-ok’s means. That's just one example of how Lee explores simple human wants, desires, jealousies. We often can't help wanting things we can't afford, especially when they've already been stamped by the approval of someone we admire.
Lee has dedicated the film to the memory of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog 10; he has said he was particularly struck by the commandment “Thou shalt not covet.” As humans, we often like nice things, but what we really need is a way to keep a roof over our head and food on the table. Possible Love explores the desperation that can strike when we can’t meet those basic needs. Sang-woo, cocksure and a little clueless, spends much of the movie on the phone making business deals. Meanwhile, Ho-seok suffers quietly, as if encased in a bubble of isolation. Mi-ok loves him, but she’s frustrated with him; no wonder she’s drawn, perhaps romantically, to sexy and stalwart Sang-woo. The movie’s most potent scene occurs late in the film when, with Ye-ji’s camera rolling, Ho-seok finally lets his guard down: Ye-ji may be getting the footage she set out for, but has she earned it honestly? Sul Kyung-gu is sensational here. If the character he’s playing is key to Ye-ji’s movie-within-a-movie, he’s also Possible Love’s anguished beating heart.
Lee’s 2018 noir mystery Burning was, what we used to call in the days before the pandemic, a surprise art-house hit. An art-house hit today may not mean the same thing as it did then, given how much the cinema-going audience has shrunk in less than 10 years. It’s hard to predict whether Possible Love will find a similarly enthusiastic audience. This is perhaps a more plainspoken movie than Burning; its moral questions are fairly easy to identify and parse. But at a time when more people worldwide are worrying about hanging onto gainful employment, even as a relatively small handful of people control the majority of the world’s wealth, the dramatic pull of Possible Love may be even greater than that of Burning. Sometimes it’s a relief when a movie captures undercurrents of anxiety that, in our daily lives, we find difficult to put into words. With Possible Love, it’s as if Lee has taken our unspoken feelings and handed them to his actors. With words and gestures, with tentative smiles and flashes of anger, they show us fears and worries we might be feeling ourselves, possibly galvanizing us to face them.
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