We’re reaching the time of year when festival favorites with Oscar hopes start making their way to theaters. This weekend is a big one for cinephiles, as Netflix is releasing “Burning” director Lee Chang-dong‘s latest heartbreaker “Possible Love” in select theaters.
Lee’s latest work uses the production of a fictional documentary to explore class divides, following two families from different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum who gradually begin to covet each other’s lives. The film is very loosely inspired by a segment of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog,” though Lee takes the material in directions that are entirely his own.
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Per an official synopsis, “Possible Love” follows “the intertwined relationship of two married couples facing different paths and hidden desires. Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) lives quietly with her laid-off husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and their young son Cheol until a funeral brings them into the orbit of Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentary filmmaker chronicling laid-off workers, and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) — a couple whose affluent lifestyle stands in sharp contrast to their own. When Mi-ok agrees to be filmed, she grows close to Ye-ji, and finds herself uneasily drawn to the unreadable Sang-woo. As their worlds collide, fractures begin to appear in their daily existence.”
“Possible Love” premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where it was met with rave reviews. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich hailed it as a “masterpiece,” noting that Lee uses his literary sensibilities to tell a story that’s subtler than his past works, but no less devastating.
“In contrast to Lee’s monumental and more explosive ‘Burning,’ the story he tells here builds on an instance of terrible violence rather than building to it, but his latest film simmers to a boil at a similar clip, and likewise alternates long dialogue scenes with indelible moments of visual acuity,” his review read. “While it’s hard for this comparatively restrained domestic saga to compete with Jeon Jong-seo’s sunset dance along the DMZ, Lee retains his gift for whipping spectacle out of thin air — for infusing something as routine as a car ride home or a quick dip in the ocean with an overwhelming degree of silent pathos. Every moment in ‘Possible Love’ crackles like a wicked symphony of striated socioeconomic abrasion; every gesture, comment, and detail sharpens the strange geometry that brings these people closer together at the same time as it deepens the divides that will ultimately keep them apart.”
Netflix will release “Possible Love” in theaters on Friday, October 23 before it streams beginning on November 6. Watch the film’s second trailer below.