Possible Love: the 77-day strike behind Lee Chang-dong’s film

Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love won the grand jury prize at Venice and is South Korea’s submission for best international feature at the Oscars. It is in cinemas now and arrives on Netflix on November 6.

The film grew from the 2009 Ssangyong Motors strike. Workers occupied the factory for 77 days to oppose proposed layoffs affecting 37% to 43% of the workforce. Riot police eventually broke up the historic protest.

Lee called the standoff one that “fundamentally changed the Korean labour movement.” He said workers’ rights had been widely accepted, but after the confrontation “the basic rights of labourers changed”; to the public, they could not outrank “market profitability or corporate competitiveness.”

After the crackdown came several suicides and reports of long-term mental health problems, Lee said. Examining “the pain of these individuals,” he shelved the project and asked: “am I worthy of telling this story? And if I am, how do I tell it? Do I stand close to the workers, or keep my distance?”

He and co-writer Oh Jung-mi later wrote “many different” scripts, including a post-apocalyptic version. Oh proposed a documentary film-maker character, which gave Lee a way into his ambivalence. The result nests “labour and its relationship to capital” inside a story about filmmaking and two couples.

Possible Love opens with the 10th commandment, “Thou shalt not covet.” Fired from a metal factory, Ho-seok reprimands his free-spirited wife Mi-ok for caring about her clothes. At the funeral of a former colleague who died by suicide after redundancy, they meet ambitious film-maker Lee Ye-ji and her financier husband Sang-woo.

After a luxury resort stay in Qatar made Ye-ji reflect on hidden labour, she plans a documentary about labour in Korea and sees Ho-seok as an ideal subject. He refuses therapy and her camera. The film moves among Ye-ji’s footage, CCTV images and newsreel-style clips of the police crackdown.

Lee, 72, made his first feature in 1997. His protagonists have included blue-collar workers, ex-prisoners and people with disabilities. Burning, adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story, placed a poor writer against a wealthier rival. His characters find small solace in nature, other people or their own willpower.

Possible Love reunites Jeon Do-yeon of Secret Sunshine with Sul Kyung-gu of Peppermint Candy and Oasis. Unlike Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, Lee’s characters do not generally scheme toward depraved victories. We watch them absorb disappointment and cruelty while retaining hope.

Lee said: “It’s difficult to use the word ‘class’ because it is so vast.” He calls Sang-woo a “symbol of capital” because he can move and control huge sums, which create further wealth on a scale Lee describes as “something of a different dimension.”

Lee did not want to seal the couples into separate worlds: “I didn’t want to show that the two couples belong to completely different worlds, because they do live in the same world.” Meetings in restaurants, homes and on a charged summer holiday expose “a gap that just cannot be crossed.”

The film tests several forms of looking. Lee wanted to examine the “issue of the gaze” and “the ethics of capturing and observing the lives and pain of others.” Ye-ji raises her camera when it discomforts Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s son, Cheol.

“Anyone who’s really hardworking, they tend to overdo it,” Lee said. He feels “closeness” toward Ye-ji, but notes that “cameras by their nature search for drama.” Equality remains elusive: “It’s very hard to be equal because the person holding the camera without even realising it is given power. And it’s a one-sided relationship.”

Lee became a film-maker almost by accident after writing in 1980s South Korea under a military government. He said: “That was our moral responsibility.” As democracy arrived, he felt that responsibility fading; literature about immediate pain was treated “as if they were expired goods,” and he was disappointed.

He took up screenwriting, then became an assistant director, almost wanting “to punish myself in a way, make myself go through something very tough.” His colleagues were moved and said: “Oh, you should be a film-maker.” His films became vehicles for impossible fights against large, impenetrable forces.

Lee’s formulation is exact: “However, despite that, I think the fight itself has meaning. I think these fights the individuals take on against the world is quite possibly the only way they are able to reclaim dignity. Regardless of your chances of winning, I think the fight itself is significant and meaningful.” The claim is moral rather than predictive: victory is not required.

Possible Love also required a fight for money. Lee struggled to secure domestic funding amid the Korean film industry’s “structural crisis,” which he linked to losses from a strict Covid 19 lockdown and the rise of streaming services. Netflix funded the film and secured theatrical release in some countries.

Lee said Ye-ji “lives with someone who holds that capital but still tries her best to be independent.” Sang-woo calls an independent film a “film independent of capital,” which Lee found amusing. Lee compared Ye-ji with himself: “I feel like she and I are in the same shoes.”

He continued: “I am also dependent on capital to get my films made. You could say that I am also someone who is married to capital, but trying to protect my own voice, which I almost think is the fate of all film-makers.”

What does the Oscar race change for the film?

Whispers of an Oscars campaign follow Venice’s prize. For audiences, it could widen the film’s reach. It will not settle the contradiction at its centre: a film-maker claiming independence while needing finance.

Lee offered no nomination forecast and no policy remedy for labour. He measures success through reception: “It’s always meaningful for me when my audiences accept the questions that I ask through my films and try to find their own answers.”

The practical test arrives on November 6, when Netflix opens the film to a wider audience. Possible Love asks whether visibility can make the structures around Ho-seok’s dismissal harder to ignore. Lee’s answer is modest: an audience may find “a very small change in their lives.” That is less than victory, but it is the change his film claims to seek.