Possible Love

Two couples of wildly contrasting means connect awkwardly in Lee Chang-dong’s perceptive and empathetic new drama. The Korean filmmaker isn’t prodigious in his output – this is his first film since 2018’s masterful thriller Burning and only his fifth of the century – but when he has something to say, it’s worth listening. Here, he delivers an absorbing parable about the ruin wreaked by late capitalism. It’s a four (and a bit)-hander that blossoms over its 164-minute runtime into a gesture of defiance for uncertain times. 

The four characters are the unsmiling Ho-seok (Peppermint Candy’s Sul Kyung-Gu), who lost his job as an industrial wielder after a private equity buyout two years previously and remains mired in silent grief and rage; his dogged, upbeat wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon); the eager Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an affluent and aspiring filmmaker who wants to get the couple on camera for a documentary about labour relations; and her husband, urbane but unknowable entrepreneur Sang-woo (Hope’s Zo In-Sung). Adding an extra dynamic is Ho-seok and Mi-ok’s neglected school-age son, a shy observer who bears the cost for his family’s hardships in his own way. 

An absorbing parable about the ruin wreaked by late capitalism

Lee carries the film along on the undercurrents that pass between this quartet. He occasionally uses footage from Ye-ji’s camera to remind us that there’s an ulterior motive to this new kinship. There are flashbacks to the industrial action that left Ho-seok traumatised, which add context to his silent suffering. Mi-ok is a fabulous character, played with a mix of deference and teak toughness by Jeon. Her burgeoning connection with the chic and breezy Mi-ok is undercut by understandable mistrust and envy too. Is Mi-ok’s interest in her and Ho-seok’s experiences genuine or merely a form of class tourism to further her filmmaking ambitions? Maybe both. Neither Mi-ok nor her husband show much sensitivity for the struggling couple, casually flaunting their wealthy and filming them without stopping to ask. The boundaries are uncomfortably fluid.

Possible Love opens with the words of the Tenth Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not covet’. It’s a reference to Dekalog 10, the final chapter of Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s great anthology of morality tales. (Lee offers an ‘in memory of’ dedication to the film and its Polish director.) The Korean auteur has talked about his film as a love story of sorts, but I connected with it more as a Loachian story about a system that uses people and tosses them away, and the impossibility of economic safety in a world of private equity. There’s a subtle message, too, in its pivotal female characters, that economic crises might recalibrate the gender divide, even if it does nothing for the class one. 

It all makes for a slower burn, less tumultuous companion piece to the Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Together, they form a bleak triptych of modern fables that show society stratifying in increasingly insurmountable ways.

Possible Love premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Out in cinemas Oct 23 and streaming on Netflix Nov 6.