Lee Chang-dong’s brilliant, melancholic drama Possible Love ends with a dedication to the master Polish filmmaker Krystof Kieslowski and his landmark miniseries Dekalog, which connected everyday life to the Ten Commandments. I had never before clocked Kieslowski’s influence on director Lee’s work, but now I see it: They have both specialized in elliptical stories, earthbound yet ethereal, about coincidence, circumstance and the cryptic language of relationships.
As Kieslowski did, Lee predicates this movie on a single Commandment: thou shalt not covet. You can no doubt have a debate about which of the movie’s characters that message is aimed at, not to mention what they’re coveting.
The film concerns two married couples in modern-day South Korea, each in a very different socioeconomic bracket. One husband and wife are factory workers; the other couple is a documentarian and her venture capitalist husband.
We learn that there has been turmoil at a local auto factory. There were layoffs, a strike and a violent confrontation between the police and employees behind the picket line. Ever since, there’s been a schism between those who are still working for the corporation and those who were let go — or, as they’re referred to by people in the village, the living and the dead.
The documentarian wants to make a film about the situation. She starts to get chummy with the factory worker’s wife, who soon becomes the documentary’s primary subject. She sits for long interviews about her experiences, talking in passionate, novelistic detail about her past. Her husband, meanwhile, refuses to talk. He gets a faraway look in his eyes whenever the factory strike is mentioned, and we wonder why.
The production goes on. In an attempt to blend in with her out-of-work subjects, the director stops wearing designer blouses and arriving to shoots in her expensive car. It culminates in the blue-collar family being invited to the rich couple’s family estate, where all pretenses of formality and nicety are finally worn down.
Some of South Korea’s biggest recent exports have explored the breakdown of the country’s working class and the cultural stigma of being unemployed: the Oscar-winning Parasite, the popular series Squid Game, last year’s comic thriller No Other Choice. Those themes are also front and center in Possible Love, as is the tenuous relationship between a documentarian and their subject. It’s kismet that this would come out in the whirlwind of press surrounding You Can See Everything, because both films suggest that subjectivity can be a weapon.
Lee’s films — the best of which are Poetry, Burning and this one — feature a catalog of unfulfilled, anguished, confused and frustrated people. He rarely lets us into their minds, so even their most conspicuous gestures remain a mystery to us. This is a long movie at 164 minutes, and every moment of it is absorbing, dictated by the seesawing dynamics between these four characters. Lee gives his plot room to breathe, and time for us to think and wonder.
Possible Love is now playing at the Magic Lantern Theatre and premieres on Netflix next Friday, Nov. 6.