Sul Kyung-gu as Ho-seok, Jung Seol as Cheol, and Jeon Do-yeon as Mi-ok.
Netflix
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Netflix
The last several years have brought an abundance of eat-the-rich stories of varying quality — no need to wonder why. But narratives offering insight beyond anxieties around the ever-widening wealth-gap and into the inextricably related issue of job insecurity have been rarer. Possible Love, director Lee Chang-dong’s first feature since the excellent 2018 psychological thriller Burning, stands out precisely because it frames capitalism’s cruelty as a labor crisis, and meticulously examines how that impacts families, relationships, and the psyche.
It begins at the funeral for a man once employed at a Korean automaking plant; in the last two years, the company has gone through a restructuring and mass layoffs, devastating the community. The man died by suicide.
In reluctant attendance is Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), his colleague and a union member quietly carrying the massive weight of the cuts and the unsuccessful workers’ strike that followed. His relationship with his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) is noticeably strained; an argument about Ho-seok’s drinking catches the eye of Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentarian making a film about the “vanishing laborer.” She senses immediately that the couple would make ideal subjects for the project, and soon enough, she’s integrating herself into their lives — much to Ho-seok’s annoyance. At first, he refuses to be interviewed about his experience; he’s refusing therapy too, despite Mi-ok’s pleas.
Possible Love slowly burns off of a mixture of tonalities; it’s melodramatic at times and grounded in others, and sometimes even bleakly funny. Through Ho-seuk and glimpses of his other ex-colleagues, Lee and his co-writer Oh Jung-mi are keenly interested in exploring the ties between work and self-worth, and the guilt and shame that accumulates when that meaning is unceremoniously stripped away.
It’s also an upstairs-downstairs tale. Ye-ji is the rare documentarian who can actually afford being a documentarian; her mysterious husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) is a wealthy international businessman and they own multiple homes. In her razor-sharp performance as Ye-ji, Cho — who audiences may recognize as the wealthy matriarch in Parasite — locks in on a character whose personal, moral and artistic aims are in constant existential conflict. The way Ye-ji’s eyes suddenly alight whenever she recognizes a perfect cinematic moment — that is, when Mi-ok or Ho-seok are being especially vulnerable for her — is at once understandable and also a little off-putting. Ye-ji’s aims to give voice to the working class are noble but always in awkward tension with her subjects, no matter how hard she strains to befriend them as though they were equals.
The friction is two-fold: even if all else were truly equal, there’s an inherent power imbalance between filmmaker and subject. The latter may choose to share their story, but that story is ultimately shaped, filtered, and presented by the director. Jeon’s richly specific performance as Mi-ok peels back the layers of agency involved in sharing one’s story at all. Unlike her husband, Mi-ok is more than eager to have cameras follow them around and be interviewed about the layoffs, even though she herself never worked at the auto plant. It’s a credit to Jeon that Mi-ok doesn’t come off as a craven opportunist; instead she represents decades’ worth of cultural shifts that have primed most of us to maintain a “public presence” (social media or otherwise) or view everyone as the star of their own self-aware Truman Show. She also clearly hopes that participating in the documentary might help open Ho-seuk up into finally confronting his trauma.
Throughout the film, an unspoken push and pull for narrative control is both subtext and text. At one point, Mi-ok bluntly asks Ye-ji the value of the shirt she’s wearing, in order to make plain the obvious: “I think your clothing stands out here. You are interviewing workers who are struggling, Ye-ji. I don’t know, I just think it stands out a bit, and it’s probably not helping.” Ye-ji deflects with a nervous, embarrassed laugh, and a knowing smirk slides across Mi-ok’s face; in that moment, at least, the subject turns the attention to the creator and exerts the soft power of sensible authority.
It’s difficult to view all of this and not think of two other recent films: last year’s No Other Choice, another searing Korean film about the indignities of corporate restructuring, and more recently You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary that unfolds as a prickly tug-of-war for control over the disgraced businesswoman’s image. Possible Love‘s execution is more subdued than either of those projects, but no less explosive in its intensity, rage, and excavation of a certain kind of emotional truth. In the film’s third act, Ye-ji and Sang-woo invite Mi-ok, Ho-seuk, and their young son to their palatial beachside estate, where the divide between performance and reality and the haves and have nots must finally be reckoned with. When the tension is ultimately released, the resolution is both surprising yet mundane; it feels exactly right.
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