Lee Chang-dong Says His Netflix Deal Mirrors His Own Film's Ethics Trap

Lee Chang-dong has returned, eight years after Burning, with Possible Love — and the film just premiered on Netflix. The drama won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at Venice in September, 24 years after Oasis earned Lee the Silver Lion for Best Director.

Lee has made only seven features in nearly thirty years. Peppermint Candy, Secret Sunshine and Burning established him as a patient portraitist of ordinary people pushed to the edge. Possible Love runs nearly three hours and builds its drama on an ethical puzzle.

The setup is simple. Two couples sit on opposite sides of a class divide, brought together by a documentary. Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) is a factory worker laid off after a brutal labor strike, a story loosely based on the 2009 Ssangyong Motor layoffs. His wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) holds the family together in the aftermath. At a funeral they meet Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a filmmaker documenting labor injustices, and her wealthy husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). Ye-ji sees Ho-seok as the perfect subject, and the situation gets muddy.

What does the film ask about the camera's gaze?

Plenty. Lee told The Film Stage that Possible Love is partly about "the attitude, the ethics, and the distance between the documentary filmmaker and her subject."

His argument has two layers. Documentary filmmakers, he said, are more sensitive to this ethical line because they stand closer to their subjects. Feature filmmakers, he argues, are less careful.

"With the material that they deal with — stories of war, refugees, victims of violence or marginalized people — oftentimes these subjects just become sheer material or, you know, consumed for entertainment and even, at times, they go so far as to be exploited," Lee said. "And so in this film I wanted to discuss and raise questions about the gaze of the camera and the distance between the camera and its subjects."

Is the director himself Ye-ji?

More than he lets on, and he admits it. Lee revealed he twice wanted to make a documentary but never did. The real parallel is money. Ye-ji is married to capital through her rich husband, yet fights for her own identity as a filmmaker. Lee sees himself in the same bind.

"As a filmmaker, I cannot make films without leaning on capital, and Netflix, with whom I worked together for Possible Love, could be part of that huge capital," he said. "And maybe you could say that I'm also married to wealth in that sense as well, and I have my own efforts of maintaining my own independent voice, and in that sense I think Ye-ji and myself, we are like mirrors that reflect one another."

That's the mechanism of the film: the character isn't a villain, she's a self-portrait. It's also the sharpest way to read the Netflix release — the director questioning his own dependency inside the platform distributing his film.

Is Ye-ji's camera intrusive?

Lee points to the funeral scene as his thesis. Ye-ji films Mi-ok and Ho-seok quarrelling; when Ho-seok yells, "Is this amusing for you?", she immediately backs off: "I'm sorry, I'll turn it off."

The moment, Lee said, shows "not only Ye-ji's personality as a character, but also the true nature of a documentary filmmaker, and, even further, the true nature of the camera."

His analysis is blunt. "The camera is bound to be drawn to anything that is more entertaining, more dramatic, or more provocative." Whoever holds the camera holds power, and how they use it shapes the ethics of the shot. He wants the audience to register every layer of looking at once: the filmmaker's gaze at her subjects, our gaze into others' lives, and the audience's own gaze at the screen.

Can art and labor find common ground?

Yes, according to Lee — at least historically. "At least when the actual strike took place, there was a sense of union and solidarity between the ones taking part in the strike and those, like the documentary filmmakers at the time, who wanted to tell their story to the world," he said. "I think, fundamentally, between art and pain and struggle, a union or solidarity is bound to take place."

He's honest about where artists actually sit, though — including himself. "When it comes to art or artists, they are somewhere in between a laborer and capital, right? So at times you could say that they're neutral. In another sense, you could say that they're cowardly. However, I still believe that the goal of art is to tell their story."

Possible Love is streaming on Netflix now, and its central question travels with it: whether a film about exploitation can escape the economics of its own making.