James Y. Lee
Oftentimes, the mark of a masterpiece can be found in the multitude of ways a film can be described—all of which are richly full worlds of their own, none of which could ever describe the totality of the film’s power. We can start with one claim, and with confidence and clarity:
Possible Love is a masterpiece.
Possible Love is South Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s latest film, his first in eight years since Burning.
Possible Love is a loose adaptation of the 2009 Ssangyong strike, one of the most harrowing labor disasters in contemporary South Korean history. After motor company Ssangyong entered receivership in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, management laid off around a third of the company’s entire workforce—2,600 people who found themselves now completely out of employment, without fully justifiable cause. Hundreds of workers at Ssangyong’s main factory barricaded themselves inside and went on strike, leading to a severe crackdown by police in which officers assaulted the striking workers with weapons of escalating intensity, culminating in a full-scale police raid. Hundreds of injuries resulted from that crackdown. Negotiations ended in only a mild compromise after over two months. Several workers who were brutalized and remained fired ended their own lives out of despair, leaving their families in tatters. Among the countless scars that linger in the modern South Korean consciousness, the Ssangyong strike is a still-bleeding wound.
Possible Love is a loose adaptation of Dekalog: Ten—or, well, not entirely. While the co-writer of Krzystof Kieślowski’s legendary Dekalog series, Krzystof Piesiwicz, is credited as a producer on Possible Love, Lee’s film merely invokes the memory of Dekalog: Ten, yet makes clear in an epigraph that Possible Love is driven by the same commandment as Kieślowski’s film—“Thou shalt not covet. 남의 것을 탐하지 않는다.” Over the course of the ensuing two hours and forty minutes, the purpose of Lee’s title becomes clear—a love that is merely “possible” is the object of the covetous, and the realm of possibility ranges far and wide.
Possible Love is a film about Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and their son, Cheol. It has been two years since their equivalent of the Ssangyong motor strike, and it has destroyed them. Ho-seok, once a bright, social factory worker at SP Heavy Industries—a man who loved his coworkers so much he called them brothers, that he built a marble table for them to share drinks in the front yard of his home—is now a man who has lost the light in his eyes, after SP suffered largely the same fate as Ssangyong. It is fitting that, among the workers who remain in SP’s orbit, the ones still in employment are called the “living,” thus making the others the “dead”—and grimly literal, too, as we see in the opening scene a funeral for the suicide of a former SP worker. Indeed, even while living, no one seems to have passed through the veil as far as Ho-seok has. Mi-ok has helped raise Cheol, an autistic child named after steel / 철 itself—all while restraining Ho-seok’s latent alcoholism, and craving the wealth that would solve their problems, that would make money no object, that would allow them to rest on the laurels of luxury.
Possible Love is not only a film about Mi-ok and Ho-seok—and as a result, it is not the only film about them. Opposite Mi-ok and Ho-seok are Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), a substantially wealthier couple whose cross with the former two proves to be deeply fateful for both clans. The first we see of Ye-ji, she’s at the aforementioned funeral in the opening scene, patiently filming the mourners with a camera, only shutting it off when confronted by a Ho-seok whose grief is about to contort into rage. We find that she wants to make a documentary about the “vanishing laborer,” inspired by an appallingly privileged vacation she took to Qatar with her husband, Sang-woo—an investor and businessman wealthy enough to purchase Porsches, summer beach houses, Sennheiser electrostatic headphones, Loro Piana handbags, etc., but ostensibly clear-headed enough to remind Ye-ji that luxury is the product of labor designed to be invisible and suppressed. It is with that first encounter with Ho-seok that Ye-ji decides to make Mi-ok and Ho-seok her documentary’s most central subject, and so she trails the couple, craving to obtain their story after the strike, through any means necessary.
Possible Love is yet another South Korean film about class. The most popular media exports from the country have almost unanimously been class commentaries, and tales of the violence that ensue. Bong Joon-ho’s masterful Parasite ensured that this trend would remain the case for the observable future, followed by the even-further-mainstreamed Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game—which also takes inspiration from Ssangyong in a scene from its first season—and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, also a tale about dignity annihilated by mass factory layoffs. But these are all works with rigid genre frameworks that exacerbate the debasing human instincts emerging from South Korea’s volatile class reckoning. Possible Love does not indulge in its peers’ stylistically distinct carnage, equally grim as it is about the despair that the post-capitalist era is responsible for. The violence that does emerge in Possible Love is heaviest when it is silent, venomous, and bloodless, when it is about the autonomy people have over their stories. For Lee, no physical bloodshed or slaughter could ever surpass the expressions of grief and anger Mi-ok and Ho-seok feel over the SP strike crackdown, nor the crassness through which Ye-ji and Sang-woo believe themselves to be uplifting their story when every moment the former’s camera remains speeding is a moment of exploitation.
Possible Love is a film with a firm gender divide. Structured around Ye-ji’s interviews with Mi-ok and Ho-seok, it becomes immensely clear that the women in this film are inclined to reveal the most about themselves. They are the only ones who drink—Sang-woo takes medication that prevents him from indulging, and Ho-seok runs the risk of sending his emotions into a tailspin when he drinks outside of the house. For a time, Mi-ok is the only character who discloses anything about the family’s story. She is our guide through the motions of how the strike unfolded, how it toppled to its knees and was kicked while it was down, what became of Mi-ok and Ho-seok in its wake, and how thoroughly it has devastated their pride. But she is also disclosing this information exclusively in interviews to Ye-ji, who cannot empathize with their pain, but zealously desires to be in close proximity to them… either out of a desire for genuine friendship, or because she knows that at any second, she can mine exceptional material for the documentary. Through them, Lee includes traditional flashbacks portraying the actual events of Mi-ok’s recollection, perhaps a defiance of the formally conversational and artificially staged mode of Ye-ji’s documentary. The men are a different matter—Ho-seok’s repression effectively renders him a ticking time bomb, and Sang-woo is far too sycophantic and formally stilted in conversation to connect with anyone on a deeper level, an inability that belies baser instincts. But they, too, will grow to be understood in time.
Possible Love is a film that understands the sprawling world of labor. The film begins its events two years after the SP strike and crackdown, where Ho-seok and Mi-ok have both found new work in different places—the former at another steel mill, the latter at a mask manufacturing plant with two other workers. We learn that Mi-ok and Ho-seok possess a foundational comprehension of labor as a lifelong affair under a certain economic level. Mi-ok in particular recounts an anecdote with her mother, a car wash worker who harshly scolded her when she took the hose herself at a very young age, enchanted by the way the water glistened in the sunlight—a memory whose romanticized hostility illustrates the constant tension of low-economic survival. The film also understands the infrastructure that exists for those left behind by the system; group therapy support, action centers to regain autonomy for the laid-off SP workers’ rights, and even the tense informal interactions they have when they encounter each other in town. In the face of this rigorously detailed comprehension of labor and its products, Ye-ji and Sang-woo are monstrosities of alien degrees of privilege; the former robbing less fortunate filmmakers of grants when she could spend her husband’s money, the latter a man who can influence fate and markets with a couple of clicks away at a keyboard.
Possible Love is likely Lee Chang-dong’s “despair project.” Burning was initially designed as the “rage project” by him and co-writer Oh Jung-mi, a portrait of a young man’s increasingly quiet fury at a world that both seems to lack and withhold answers. In a sense, Possible Love is a response to Burning‘s malaise rooted in the unknowable, because for Mi-ok and Ho-seok, the threat and its ostensible omnipotence are clear as day—and that twists their rage, an actionable emotion, into the stasis of helplessness and resentment. SP was doomed the second it came under the influence of private equity. Ye-ji and Sang-woo are contributors to a problem that they pretend to be benefactors for. The gulf of class disparity between the couples is only partially bridged as a result of their coexistence in the human species, in the same country, under the same sky, but their spiritual qualities are completely irreconcilable. It is what they do with that irreconcilability that makes their every interaction fascinating, constantly raising questions of not just who gets to tell the story of SP’s downfall, but also the selective nature of what Ye-ji considers the worthwhile story within it, and who is hearing them speak on or off Ye-ji’s camera.
Possible Love is a personal reckoning with Lee Chang-dong’s responsibility as a filmmaker. Faced with the question of how to portray the agony of the Ssangyong crisis in a film, Lee was unable to find artistically justifiable answers that suited his process and his tenets of responsibility. Oh Jung-mi proved vital to the writing process; it was through the narrative incorporation of Ye-ji’s documentary that Lee was able to discover the conviction necessary to proceed. It is a fitting reckoning for a man who has spent a storied, legendary career constructing a South Korean flavor of neorealism, one where his tales of the downtrodden span from those of the disabled to the disadvantaged young, the elderly, those abandoned by God, and so on. It is also an encouraging sign of consistency for Lee, now 72 years old, entering perhaps the twilight years of his career yet still maintaining his beliefs well enough for them to be challenged artistically.
Possible Love is ultimately not what you expect. Its final stretch is set at a location previously unseen in the film, closer in proximity to nature than its rigorous focus on labor thus far would have most audiences expecting. But that proximity, among countless other factors, is what allows the ensuing catharsis and deconstruction to be that much more striking. The film’s invocation of “Thou shalt not covet” is also an invitation to consider it in the context of all four of these characters, to realize what each of them desires that does not belong to them, that they no longer possess, that they never had in the first place. It is where Sul, Jeon, Cho, and Zo get their chance to fully shine, finally revealing the innermost depths of their characters to a harrowingly potent and intersectional effect. It is the place beyond civilization where Possible Love crystallizes as another one of Lee’s masterpieces in his pantheonic filmography, and a nuanced examination of the stark class divides of our modern era, destined to linger with you long after its poetic, reconciliatory final image.
Possible Love is…
