Lee Chang-dong returns with a relationship drama both inscrutable and illuminating.
© Netflix
South Korean director Lee Chang-dong is not one to be nailed down to a specific genre. Some seven years after his deliciously creepy and ambiguous psychological thriller Burning, one based on a Haruki Murakami short story, he’s back with something altogether different. The filmmaker’s new movie Possible Love ditches the lingering atmosphere of unease; or maybe it’s simply the type of unease that has been switched, from the potentially murderous mind-games of Burning to the kind of family-on-the-rocks drama with which we’re now presented. Both films present tension in their own way, although Possible Love is more open with the possibility of redemption, not that it’s an easy journey to get there.
Possible Love returns to the more intimate space of the director’s affecting 2010 movie Poetry, eliciting an excellent performance from Jeon Do-yeon as Mi-ok, a wife who seems to have long lived in the shadow of her taciturn husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu). If the latter is resolutely introverted, Mi-ok appears to talk overtime on his behalf, and their young son Cheol is caught in the middle.
While attending the funeral of one of Ho-seok’s co-workers who has committed suicide, Mi-ok makes the acquaintance of documentary maker Lee Ye-ji (played by Cho Yeo-jeong, best known to Western audiences as the upper-class mother in Bong Joon-ho’s searing Parasite). The latter detects a narrative of sorts in the meek and mild Mi-ok and gains enough of her confidence to record her home life, although there is an exploitative edge to the decision. The relatively well-off Lee Ye-ji is chronicling the lives of South Korea’s labouring class, although one could also see it through her eyes as an anthropological study of people with whom she has no connection at all; Lee Ye-ji’s husband is the wealthy CEO Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) and she effectively wants for nothing, so one suspects a freak show fascination in the project she’s putting together.
As they say, the camera never lies and, via Jeon Do-yeon’s marvellously subtle performance, we see Mi-ok throwing off years of conjugal subjugation as she starts to confess details of her life that may seem banal in context, but magical through a lens. At the centre is the relationship with her husband, and this is where Lee Chang-dong allows tougher notes to creep in, building a profile of the enigmatic Ho-seok who, before losing his job as a labour unionist, suffered life-altering injuries in a violent conflict with the police. The director’s camerawork rarely moves, utilising locked-off shots and long takes in the manner of Possible Love’s film-within-a-film to show people reconciling with themselves and the trauma of their individual and shared pasts. Flashbacks are cued organically, not with Scooby Doo-style wavy lines but hard cuts from one scene into the next, sketching the central married couple’s backstory with economy and a restrained lack of melodrama.
Indeed, those expecting something more explosive may well be baffled by how interior Chang-dong’s new film is. It begins with a title character quoting Bible scripture, “Thou shalt not covet”, and one may expect a steamy, overheated drama to result from that. Instead, things stay resolutely, defiantly quiet, with the body language of the character speaking a thousand words in every frame, especially the increasingly liberated Mi-ok and the rapidly thawing Ho-seok. Even when the final act relocates to Sang-woo’s luxury cliffside home, and there is the slightest suggestion of carnal attraction with an impromptu nude swimming scene, Possible Love remains suggestive, discreet, even. More intriguing is the sense of a bridge between the two families on either side of the camera; the repeated image of the moon seems to be one with the potential of bridging the wealth divide. If it lacks the visceral pleasures of Burning, then Possible Love still offers plenty of brain food for patient viewers, and cements Lee Chang-dong as a fine chronicler of human neurosis, even when, as here, it’s on a distinctly slower and steadier register.
Rating: 4/5
Sean Wilson is a Film Critic based in Bristol, UK. If you enjoyed his review, please consider supporting him by subscribing to his substack or by purchasing his book The Sound of Cinema
