To make art is to act selfishly, arguing otherwise is naught but folly. Possible Love is a dirge-like, sprawling character piece concerned with a myriad of present-day society’s mundane, yet nigh-universal woes. In his first film in eight years following 2018’s Burning, famed South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong dedicates Possible Love in part to the final episode of Polish Moral-Anxiety-era titan Krzysztof Kieślowski’s acclaimed Dekalog series. “Thou shalt not covet”, a brief interstitial reminds us as the film begins; an echo of an echo. What follows is a meticulous unwinding of that final commandment in context with modernity, fraught with discomfort and erotic transgression.
Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) are ghosts, a family devastated by a brutal corporate restructuring, leaving the latter jobless and depressed. Mi-ok is forced into low-income labour exploitation to support the family, drifting evermore far away from her beleaguered husband, whose memories of participating in a sit-down union strike that left him abused and humiliated send him further into isolation. The couple, along with their son Cheol (Jeong Seop), find themselves the primary subject of documentarian Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong)’s latest film, which follows the aftermath of both the restructure and the strike, and the effects both had on the workers that lost their jobs. As Ye-ji gets closer to the family in an attempt to mine more of their working-class authenticity for her work, lines become blurred, and questions arise as to whether the affluent director’s goals are quite as altruistic as she thinks.
As one might expect from a director who frequently takes such long gaps between new releases, director Lee takes his time here. His script is dense, and brimming with subtlety. Lee’s talents as a novelist quickly become apparent, as much of the film centres around characters recollecting their past experiences to others in a prose-like mode. Also established is an air of detached discomfort as Ye-ji begins to integrate herself into Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s lives. There’s an evident culture clash between the low-income struggles of the family and Ye-ji’s class-blind naivety that director Lee allows to fester as the film progresses. Try as she might to convince herself otherwise, Ye-ji’s noble intentions are the delusions of a liberal-minded individual with more money than sense, and she cannot seem to compute that in her attempts to bring light to the abuse the family has suffered she is merely abusing them in a different kind of way. Lee’s vast treatment also exposes Ye-ji’s ignorance compromising the sanctity of her own life. In her obsession she completely misses the blossoming affair between her own husband, the ultra-rich Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), and Mi-ok, whose own coveting of her new prosperous friends’ life stretches past Ye-ji’s in parallel fashion. There’s a satisfying erotic danger to Mi-ok and Sang-woo’s infidelity, played off excellently by actors Do-yeon and Zo In-sung respectively. Do-yeon displays masterful control of stolen glances and micro-expressions that electrify the air around her person. Meanwhile, In-sung makes use of his own well-cut physicality, lending a swaggering arrogance to Sang-woo that he reveals by degrees, ensuring his choices never cloy or feel parodic.
Kyung-gu’s stint as family patriarch Ho-seok, however, is particularly magnetic. He gives a clenched fist of a performance, holding onto a roil of chaotic emotion with impressive restraint. Up until Possible Love’s final quarter, Ho-seok has very little to say to anyone, his presence reduced to a set of glowering, misery-stricken eyes and a few guarded grunts and yells. Kyung-gu fashions a complex emotional exterior for his role, almost impervious to penetration save for a few carefully allowed glimpses into Ho-seok’s inner world. Much like Ye-ji within the world of the film, we as an audience begin to feel increasingly drawn to the enigma of who Ho-seok truly is, and what he has suffered. A particularly stand-out moment features the lonely father following an old co-worker to a restaurant, taking a seat opposite this near-stranger’s table and watching a birthday party, his face permanently affixed with silent despair. Director Lee’s literary sensibilities occasionally threaten to over-bloat Possible Love with dialogue, but moments like these in tandem with Kyung-gu’s excellent performance show that Lee knows when to let the film’s visuals speak for themselves.
Formally, Possible Love adopts the mode of run-and-gun documentary filmmaking, as Lee employs handheld, gimble-assisted methods of capture. As Ye-ji blurs the lines between her professional and private relationships with Mi-ok and Ho-seok, so too does Lee blur the line between diegetic camerawork and otherwise. We can never quite be certain whether or not what we are seeing at any given time is from the perspective of Ye-ji’s camera within the world of the film, or Lee’s that exists outside it. Often, whether what we see is authentic or controlled performance does not make itself apparent straight away, leading to some stomach-turning reveals. Exposing the artifice of documentary in such a way works as good shorthand for highlighting Ye-ji’s increasingly greedy manipulations of the family, as her frequent appearances hovering in blurred backgrounds become laden with sinister undertones. Also lingering in the background of scenes are various instances of working-class individuals, whose silent presence contributes to the film’s overall uneasy commentary on class-division.
A hanging bleakness emerges from the film’s closing moments, as Lee presents us with a modern status quo that thrives on cynicism and obliviousness. Possible Love is a mature reminder that late-stage capitalism is a system in which all those who participate, top-to-bottom, are culpable. We cannot continue to see the world as a stage for a conflict betwixt “good” and “bad” people when the problems that face us are so evidently a case of systemics. We live in a world where selfishness is intrinsically rewarded, and no matter how honourable one’s intentions are, or how humble one’s background is, we will always be tempted to covet more and more. Until we can come to terms with this, the world will remain a factory of monstrosities, exporting us all as either vampires or spectres alike.
