The South Korean writer and director Lee Chang-dong makes beautiful films about terrible things. The question that haunts his stories, giving them a pulsing undertow of dread, is whether those things have already happened or not. In “Secret Sunshine” (2010), a young widow moves to a new town with her son; tragedy has scarred them both, but the film, relentless in its ability to surprise, has even graver ills in store. “Peppermint Candy,” which had its première in 1999, unspools a nightmare in reverse: it opens with a man’s suicide, then rewinds gradually, through two decades of accumulated agonies, to reveal how he got there. In Lee’s movies, time tends to flow inexorably in a single direction, sans flashbacks (or flash-forwards). We see the characters’ histories in their anxious posture, their stricken faces, their frustrated yearning for a glimmer of transcendence.
Time works a bit differently in “Possible Love,” Lee’s first feature since the masterly psychological drama “Burning” (2018). The pain of this story lies squarely in the past, and Lee, who wrote the script with Oh Jung-mi, proves more willing than usual to bridge the gap between then and now. The outset is linear enough. We are in an unnamed town where, two years earlier, a manufacturer named SP Heavy Industries laid off forty per cent of its workforce. The workers organized a strike, but their efforts were brutally suppressed. Among the terminated is a welder, Choi Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), who wears a frown so implacable that it might have been etched in steel. He has since found another manufacturing job, and his sharp-witted, warm-spirited wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), works at a protective-face-mask factory. They have a young son, Cheol, an ordinary kid with a telltale core of solemnity. The Chois can’t shake their memories of more prosperous times, or of the profit-motivated culling that brought them to an end.
They are not alone in their trauma. We meet the Chois on their way to a memorial gathering for a former colleague of Ho-seok’s who took his own life. The grief of those in attendance goes beyond one death; they seem zombified by their anguish. One woman, though, stands calmly apart. Her name is Lee Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), and she’s shooting a documentary about laid-off workers. Ye-ji is an amateur but she has a muckraker’s instinct for drama. When Mi-ok whisks a cup of soju away from Ho-seok—he’s an alcoholic, and has promised never to drink in public—Yeji, anticipating an outburst, thrusts her lens into the fray. “Do we amuse you?” Ho-seok growls at her. She apologetically lowers her camera, though not for long. She knows there’s a story here, and Lee does, too.
Despite this inauspicious start, Mi-ok and Ye-ji become fast friends. So enlivened are they in each other’s company—and so gracefully does Jeon’s performance harmonize with Cho’s—that you’re tempted to forget Ye-ji’s ulterior motives. But Mi-ok is never blind to them, or to another complicating fact: her new friend is very wealthy. At one point, she calmly calls her out for wearing a pricey-looking shirt while interviewing people who’ve been laid off. Ye-ji has a hunky hedge-fund-type husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), who condescendingly tolerates, but doesn’t finance, his wife’s cinematic caprices. Seeing her attempt to empathize with her subjects, Sang-woo extends the most backhanded of compliments. “You’re different from those people. But you yourself believe that you’re the same,” he says. “That’s great.”
Ye-ji blanches at that jab but only tightens her grip on her project: the Chois are to be the battered working-class foundation of her vérité masterpiece. Ho-seok wants no part of it. Inarticulate with self-loathing, he can scarcely drag himself to his ex-colleagues’ regular group-therapy sessions, let alone unburden himself on camera. But Mi-ok is game to be interviewed, and her words spring to life in wistfully lovely flashbacks. Here she is as a young girl, witnessing, for the first time, the depths of her mother’s working-class shame. And here she is as a teen-ager, catching the eye of a brashly confident Ho-seok, and sensing, with a thrill, that her sheltered world has finally burst open. The first time I saw “Possible Love,” these forays into the past, for all their dewy poignancy, felt like missteps—a rare concession to the backstory gods. Only on a subsequent viewing did I see the craftiness in Lee’s design: Are these Mi-ok’s tearily recalled flashbacks? Or are they being imagined by Ye-ji, eager to transform her subject’s every reverie into a reënactment?
All of which is to say that “Possible Love” is a multitasking marvel: a drama about the fragility of unions, in every sense, wrapped in a seminar on documentary ethics, but one with implications for the fiction realm, too. In an interview, Lee has said that it’s no coincidence he and Ye-ji share a surname, however common. He employs a lightly jostling handheld camera that insidiously mimics the formal syntax of Ye-ji’s documentary—and, in so doing, leaves the mere idea of authorial objectivity by the wayside. (The cinematographer is Kim Ji-yong.) Lee seems to be acknowledging his own potential for dramatic exploitation, if not of his characters, then of the events that inspired the story—an automaker’s restructuring in Korea in 2009 that threatened thousands of layoffs, leading to both a strike and a police crackdown. Lee knows that the liberties of fiction do not absolve him of a responsibility to tell the truth.
No wonder some of the film’s most piercing moments are on the periphery. One woman in a group-counselling session recalls the joyous early days of the strike, with their almost sacred spirit of community: “In all my life, I’ve never felt such happiness.” Another speaks of dreading the elevator in her building, lest she run into neighbors who still work at SP Heavy. Lee’s films have often zeroed in on misfits and outcasts, cut off from society’s embrace. What he evokes here is a different kind of alienation, suffused with bitterness and loss: a mass- casualty event that once brought people together must now be suffered in isolation. The boldest declarations of solidarity, Lee knows, often precede the quietest and cruellest of betrayals.
After the film’s première, at the Venice International Film Festival (where it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize), more than a few observers invoked another class-conscious, double-decker marriage story from Korea: Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” (2019). (In both films, Cho Yeo-jeong, evidently cursed with resting rich face, plays the wealthier of two wives.) Lee’s contemplative realism could hardly be further removed from Bong’s blood-slicked flamboyance, but let’s indulge the reductive comparison. Like “Parasite,” “Possible Love” leads us into an enviable piece of real estate—Sang-woo’s family vacation home, a beachside paradise that was built for knotty third acts. But Lee, who has been known to gut his characters in the final stretch, doesn’t raise the body count to Bongian proportions. There is violence here, but it comes at us obliquely, with no inflection or exaggeration—in a sex scene that shivers with menace, or through a grimly mediated screen of documentary footage. Physical force has a hundred ways to shock and linger, but, crucially, it isn’t granted the last word.
The title asks whether love can survive what life throws at it: unemployment, depression, addiction, disappointment, poverty. A superficial glance would conclude that Ye-ji and Sang-woo are a dream couple, yet the more we see of them, the more glaring their lack of emotional capital. Miraculously, though, whenever the camera shifts to Ho-seok and Mi-ok—whether they’re bickering on their way home or scarfing down late-night snacks on the kitchen floor—love feels not just possible but plausible. Sul and Jeon have admittedly had plenty of practice; this is the third movie, after “I Wish I Had a Wife” and “Birthday,” in which they’ve played a couple. Both actors have also worked with Lee before, to tremendous effect. Sul was the suicidal protagonist of “Peppermint Candy,” and Jeon was the grieving heroine of “Secret Sunshine”—two performances that, for sustained emotional force, have few rivals in the acting annals of this century. They, too, are part of the past that haunts “Possible Love.”
Faced with such a high-stakes reunion, the actors, wisely, rise to the challenge with exacting understatement. You keep waiting for Sul to explode, but Ho-seok’s sadness lies beyond histrionics, and we realize that he isn’t angry or distant by nature; his decency cost him almost everything, and he now wields detachment as a shield against further harm. Without his wife to chide and console him, where would he be? Mi-ok feels her family’s losses acutely, but her impishly defiant spirit—watch as she tells her boss she’s starting a union, almost on a whim, like a goofball Norma Rae—has armored her against despair. And Jeon, in the most intricately detailed and emotionally liberated performance I’ve seen this year, gives flesh and definition to the character’s sardonic sense of mischief, her sudden spasms of grief, and her deep understanding that the most romantic gestures can be the most pragmatic. Hence the gorgeous moment when Mi-ok joins Ho-seok for a nightcap under the stars—secret moonshine—and affirms that, in the face of insurmountable problems, enduring them together is their only solution. “Drinking without you, it’s so bitter,” Ho-seok says. Solidarity forever. ♦