‘Possible Love’ review: An intoxicating character study

Lee Chang-dong, the master filmmaker behind critical works such as Burning and Secret Sunshine, returns with his latest literary marvel, Possible Love.

A constant divide runs through Possible Love, a film that blisters, boils, and blooms with stomach-churning restraint. A divide in class, character, and expression of catharsis runs through, depicted through literal visual notes. Two characters stare at one another from different sides of the road, or in the woods. There’s the divide of time, as memories sour and become more potent: the trauma of being left behind. It’s the divide in how characters use their cameras, whether to indulge in the opulence around them or to prey on the poor, pitiful, suffering souls who linger in the margins of society. In Choi Ho-seok, it is the division between those who are still “alive” and those who are “dead.”

Observational and careful in how the story patiently unravels, Possible Love delivers a potent character study of how we feed our desires, chasing the profit of others. “Thou shalt not covet,” the film decrees early in its runtime, and what follows is four characters all grappling with what it means to want.

Choi Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), beaten, belittled, and nearly mute in his struggle to communicate post-imprisonment, wants his old life back. Following the brutal layoffs endured by his employer, SP Heavy Industries, he – along with the rest of the metalworkers union – protested the cuts and barricaded themselves on the roof of the building. This is broken up by a helicopter raid that leaves some union members dead. If you were to ask Ho-seok, while he might’ve made it off the roof, bloodied and unconscious, he is no longer among the living.

With quiet assuredness, Lee Chang-dong delivers another masterpiece.

He and his wife, Ahn Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), try to go about life as best they can following such inhumane treatment. At one of the union members’ wakes, they run into documentary filmmaker Lee Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her wealthy husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), and their lives are twisted into a manipulated narrative. Yee-ji says she wants to make a documentary about the plight of “invisible laborers” and the damage done to workers abruptly cut off from their sources of income. But by making Ho-seok and Mi-ok her “leads,” she instead chases a story of her own making, her easy affluence a sign that she isn’t doing this solely out of altruism.

How the story unravels and layers upon itself over the course of the two-plus hours is a masterful display of withholding. Written by Lee Chang-dong and Oh Jung-mi, the film takes its time in showing its full hands. From the devastating truth behind Ho-seok’s firing to the lengths Ye-ji will go to get a perfect shot, Possible Love slowly but surely earns our complete, unblinking investment.

Along with the divides there’s restless parallels, and not just the roads and paths that drive wedges between our characters. Early in the film, Mi-ok tells a story about her mother telling her to stop playing with a hose, lest it somehow manifest a life of lowly laboring. She laughs at it but later watches her own son create rainbows with the water from the hose as it catches a light, her face forlorn.

Possible Love refuses easy answers.

In her own quiet life, she finds contentment, happily picking out clothes and snapping photos of treats and flashes of beauty that stumble across her. But in the shadow of real lavishness, she curls inward, no longer able to fight to defend the life she leads. Two characters bond over living under the same moon despite being hundreds of thousands of miles away. Later, the moon signifies everything changed.

Ambitious in its straightforward depiction of lives in flux, it would be easy – too easy – to draw comparisons to other recent films about the class divide in South Korea and the way workers are exploited and tossed away. From the eat-the-rich narratives of Parasite, to the economic hysteria of an uncertain work force in No Other Choice, to Lee’s own Burning, which similarly explored the lecherous acts of the nauseatingly wealthy, there are similarities, surely.

But the most absorbing element of Possible Love is how much it eschews our expectations. The blowouts are immense but deeply personal and wounded, ferried by bouts of unexpected warmth. The volcanic moments of catharsis carry an edge of voyeurism, as even Mi-ok worries about seeing too much of her husband’s pain.

The performances are transcendent. And while Cho Yeo-jeong brings a fanged charisma to Ye-ji, it’s Sul Kyung-gu and Jeon Do-yeon who give the film its power. Sul Kyung-gu delivers a haunted performance, playing a character so convinced of his artificial life that, when his expected outbursts begin, he plays it as if even Ho-seok is surprised by the vigor and pain left in him.

Jeon Do-yeon delivers a performance so complex and layered that she alone deserves a rewatch.

Jeon Do-yeon gives, perhaps, the performance of the year as a woman whose easygoing nature belies a cunning intuition that keeps her and her family above water. Just watching her watch the other actors reveals a performer of such high caliber that it’s impossible to peel our eyes away. Each look, each mild transgression or flirtation, holds insurmountable weight. It’s an internalized monologue that plays on her face as she watches and listens.

It’s a film worthy of dog-ears and warped spines, margin notes, and receipts as bookmarks. The direction, coupled with the expressive and expansive cinematography by Kim Ji-yong that never lets us forget the great breadth of space between the two couples, and the clever editing that slowly, sometimes hilariously, reveals the fifth major player in this quartet (Ye-ji’s goddamn camera), builds to a simmering, intoxicating summit. A precipice of something more, something else, something different, before the tide turns and brings us back to reality.

The only part that doesn’t work are any moments that steal us away from the present. Because while the flashbacks shade in pieces of the characters, their past selves aren’t nearly as interesting as their current iterations.

One of the film’s best lines comes when Mi-ok, self-effacing, describes Lee Ye-ji and Sang-woo’s vacation home as “a place in a novel I’ve never read.” It’s a gorgeous summation of the film and our most latent wants. Somewhere, something, beyond our reach. Wants only become dangerous when the possibility to catch them flies near.

Possible Love is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix. Watch the trailer below. 

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Images courtesy of Netflix.