Lee Chang-dong Returns After Eight Years With 'Possible Love'

By Elena Vasquez

Eight years after his last feature, writer-director Lee Chang-dong has returned with Possible Love, a class-conscious Korean drama that critics say contains four of the best performances of the year.

Lee co-wrote the film with Oh Jung-mi. It arrives nearly a decade after Burning, his 2018 psychological thriller. Lee belongs, by critical consensus, to a rare breed of filmmakers who have never made anything less than a great movie — and the long gaps between his projects have become part of his legend.

What is the film about?

Possible Love takes its inspiration from a 2009 incident in Korea, when a car factory laid off one-third of its workforce. The metal workers' union organized a strike. Police brutally shut it down. Many of the workers subsequently took their own lives.

The film follows a married couple two years after a similar tragedy shook their small industrial town. Sul Kyung-gu plays Ho-seok, a welder laid off during a major restructuring. He has found another metalworking job, but the pain of his termination lingers, and he has become an alcoholic. Jeon Do-yeon plays his wife, Mi-ok, who works at a face-mask manufacturer and serves as the warm glue holding the family — which includes a young son — together.

Early in the film, the couple meets Ye-ji, an aspiring filmmaker shooting a documentary about the layoffs. Only Mi-ok agrees to be interviewed. On camera she reveals her past: flashbacks show her with her mother, who felt ashamed and angry about their working-class roots, and the thrilling day she and Ho-seok first met as teenagers.

How does the film handle class and power?

Ye-ji shares her own story too, including how she met her very handsome, very rich hedge-fund-investor-type husband. But the flow of information runs largely one way. The film never lets viewers forget that the two women's 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 plays like a treatise on documentary ethics. Lee sharply implicates himself as well: his gently handheld camerawork sometimes blurs into Ye-ji's footage, making it hard to tell whose perspective the audience is seeing. Lee appears to acknowledge that fictional and nonfictional storytelling both have their manipulations.

The real-world resonance extends to the release itself. Possible Love opens in the same month that its distributor, Netflix, laid off 6% of its global workforce — a staggering figure for a company of its scale.

Some of the film's most moving moments take place at a group-counseling session for laid-off workers and their spouses, where they recall the joyous early days of the strike and the solidarity they felt before it was shut down. Lee's earlier films Oasis and Peppermint Candy portrayed misfits and outcasts. Here he explores a different alienation: the rupture of a once-great community.

Why the 'Parasite' comparisons — and why they fall short

Since its premiere at festivals earlier this fall, Possible Love has drawn many 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 similar. Where Parasite was a virtuoso Hitchcockian thriller, Possible Love has an almost novelistic richness and depth of character — and four of the year's best performances.

Zo In-sung, as Ye-ji's husband, is such a smooth mix of condescension and charm that viewers might not recognize him from the recent monster movie Hope. Sul, as the depressed and drunken Ho-seok, gives a quietly implosive, deeply mysterious performance, revealing layers of himself through the final moments.

Can love survive?

Mi-ok, the critics' standout, is described as one of the most memorably complex characters in any movie this year. She has not given in to despair. She meets every challenge with a playful sense of mischief, and even the way she chides her husband makes clear the depth of their connection.

The title poses a question: whether love can survive life's difficulties. For all their deeply human foibles, Ho-seok and Mi-ok answer it, in the film's own words, "with a resounding yes."