Korean director Lee Chang-dong isn’t in a hurry nor is he eager to clobber an audience with heavy-handed plot points. Instead, Lee (Burning) unwinds a story slowly, all the while deepening our understanding of his characters. In Lee's hands, the ordinary can become revealing.
In Possible Love, Lee introduces us to two couples -- one, working class, the other, affluent. He brings them together with a provocative twist: Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) wants to make a documentary that focuses on working-class life, a group to which she no longer belongs thanks to her marriage to a successful financier (Zo In-sung).
Yi-ji focuses on Mi-ok (a terrific Jeon Do-yeon) and her husband (Sul Kyung-gu), a couple deeply impacted by the strike that cost the husband his job and put the family under terrible economic duress.
Possible Love deals with class and the decline of the industrial economy. But Lee is too smart and nuanced to make a political screed or to turn his characters into working-class heroes. He skillfully explores the ways different lives are impacted by an economy marked by uncertainty in the lower rungs and profits in the upper levels.
His movie hinges on tensions created by the interaction of individuals and their economic conditions, and, to a lesser extent, of an evolving relationship between a filmmaker and her subjects, but none of the characters are caricatured or locked into stereotypical prisons.
The working-class couple also has a young son (Jeong Seop) who doesn’t fit in with his schoolmates; it’s as if he — like his parents — has been displaced from his social milieu. He hardly talks. He seems to stand watch over the proceedings like a silent conscience.
Lee's characters aren’t meant to illustrate sociological observations; they’re living breathing people who are defined not only by class but by the depth with which Lee understands their humanity.
At two hours and 44 minutes, Possible Love may sound long, but it's absorbing in ways that most movies aren't, unfolding in novelistic fashion without being literary or pretentious.
Lee includes flashbacks about how Mi-ok and her husband met and about Mi-ok’s childhood. His depiction of the police breaking up the strike that's central to the movie can be brutal to watch. But everything we see in Possible Love feels like it's happening in the present, illuminating something Lee wants us to consider.
During a therapy session for laid-off workers, one woman offers a poignant account of the joy she felt at being part of the pre-strike community of workers, a sense of belonging she had never experienced and never expect to feel again.
Jeon gives the key performance as a woman who, at least initially, thinks the documentary maker might become a friend. When she and Ye-ji interact, they can be like any two women, teasing each other or sharing intimacies, calling each other "sister." But we know that that the relationship between a director and her subjects inevitably harbors hints of exploitation.
When the two couples vacation together at the wealthy husband’s estate, Lee’s direction becomes increasingly subtle and his characters are more exposed. Sui's character's impacted anger begins to clarify, as does the businessman-husband's casually expressed sense of entitlement. Mi-ok undergoes a powerful awakening.
Possible Love demands patience and close observation, but Lee more than rewards us off with a character-based movie that is psychologically astute, aware of the world its characters occupy, and deeply attuned to its characters' limitations and possibilities.
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