In 2009, workers at SsangYong Motor, a Korean carmaker, staged a strike after the company announced it would lay off a number of workers at a factory in the city of Pyeongtaek. Workers occupied the plant in a strike that lasted 77 days, by the end of which the plant was effectively a “war zone,” according to a New York Times report at the time. In a series of raids throughout that time, police officers swarmed into the plant from helicopters, attempting to beat the strikers into submission in a whirl of chaos.
A version of this scene plays out in Lee Chang-dong’s new film “Possible Love,” which follows a married couple in the wake of a labor dispute based on the 2009 incident. After being laid off from his job at the fictional SP Heavy Industries, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) are lost in economic and personal upheaval.
On the way to a funeral for one of Ho-seok’s former colleagues, who died by suicide after losing his job, Mi-ok tries to hold in her tears. Ho-seok, on the other hand, looks spent, almost numb. He slowly reaches his hand to Mi-ok’s neck, telling her it’s okay if she wants to cry. She gives in, but she subtly inches away from his touch. This incident has destroyed any intimacy between them. He can barely touch her, and she can barely let him. It’s at this funeral that they meet Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an ambitious documentarian who immediately zeroes in on the obvious tension between Ho-seok and Mi-ok as a way into the movie she’s making about the laborers and their struggle.
Over the past several years, there have been a plethora of Korean films and television shows about societal clash and economic strife (the 2009 strike also partly inspired the hit series “Squid Game”). And Lee has always been interested in people who tend to get lost in the proverbial shuffle – blue-collar workers, people with disabilities, elderly people, you name it.
But the film that “Possible Love” might share the most DNA with is, oddly enough, the newly released “You Can See Everything.” Both films wrestle with the pursuit of truth (and whether that’s even possible), and how documentaries and media manipulate said truth. But, “Possible Love” is less interested in process than subject, and far more interested in exploitation and what happens when the manipulation breaks down. The film unfolds at a slow, deliberate pace, each piece of information, each visual cue, each character beat unfolding with precision until its ending hits you like a wallop straight to the chest.
“Possible Love” calls into question motive first and foremost, especially motives that are rooted in power structures – not just the company’s motives for restructuring, but the director’s movies for capturing the aftermath. Cho’s performance of Ye-ji is fascinating – sunny and bright, well-meaning and empathetic, but also deeply enigmatic at times. She’s married to Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), a wealthy businessman (what business, exactly, is left purposefully vague), and as she dives deeper into the film, she attempts to bring Mi-ok and Ho-seok into her and her husband’s lives – not just as documentary subjects, but friends. They go to couples’ dinners. Ye-ji and Sang-woo become involved in Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s young son’s life. And they go on a pivotal trip together to Sang-woo’s family beach house, which takes up the last fourth or so of the film.
Any journalist worth their salt knows that becoming this entwined in a subject’s life is a bad idea. But trying to pin down Ye-ji’s motives for doing so proves thornier by the second, particularly in the aftermath of a late film reveal. Her husband – perhaps the most black and white character in the movie – calls it an act. “You’re doing great method acting,” he says to her slyly in the car on the way to the beach house, but she insists her care for Mi-ok and Ho-seok is real. Cho’s performance – every time her eyes light up when Mi-ok says something camera worthy, every time she shares what seems like a genuine laugh with her – teeters a very thin line. Is she naive? Or is she trying to atone for something?
“Possible Love” further muddies that question by increasingly blurring the world of the documentary and the world of the movie. Towards the beginning of the film, you are always aware of what movie you’re in – Ye-ji’s film, or Lee’s. But as “Possible Love” goes on, there are moments where you think you’re in Lee’s film, and then the camera will subtly shift – either to reveal Ye-ji and her crew, or to reveal something in the viewpoint itself. In one scene, Ho-seok follows an old co-worker – one who got to keep his job – to a family dinner. We watch him, the camera positioned outside of the restaurant, as he sits down at the table next to the family. All of sudden, the camera moves in such a way – a shaky sort of zoom – that makes you question who, exactly, is behind the camera.
Lee purposefully puts you in the documentarian’s shoes. Her story revolves around this couple, but it really revolves around Ho-seok as the harder nut to crack. While he’s clearly broken by this experience – and Sul has such a dullness in his eyes that it’s sometimes hard to look at him – there are moments where he crackles with emotion. In a scene where he goes to group therapy with other laid off workers, it seems as though he might finally share some piece of his pain with them. But as one woman starts to talk about the solidarity and closeness she felt with the other workers during the strike, he begins to clam up, the tension building until he finally has to leave the room.
The constant back and forth between numbness and barely repressed rawness compels Ho-seok to both the audience and Ye-ji, and you get the feeling that once he cracks, the movie will break wide open with him. He is the key to catharsis, both for the audience and Ye-ji’s film. But when that moment finally comes, it is so far away from the catharsis you’ve been craving. When He-seok finally cracks, he becomes a pulsing nerve that’s too sensitive to touch – something that feels too uncomfortably vulnerable and honest to capture on camera.
He-seok’s outburst is key to the film’s exploration of exploitation, something that the real heart of the movie, Mi-ok, has to come to terms with as she pushes her husband to open up in front of relative strangers, hoping that the act of doing so will be good for him no matter the forum (something she is, totally, heartbreakingly, wrong about). Jeon delivers a stunningly clear-eyed performance, mining the well of loneliness that opens Mi-ok up to being interested in the surface-level connection that Ye-ji offers. Her early eagerness to participate leads to quietly soul-crushing moments – her attempts to hide her embarrassment while she’s showing Ye-ji around her home are particularly searing – and her arc through the film allows the audience an equally clear-eyed view into how power, however subtly deployed, operates and exploits those at its mercy. Mi-ok takes the most defined journey of any character in the film, from willing participant in Ye-ji’s project (however well-meaning or not) to shrewdly perceptive about the class machinations that put her and her husband on one side of the camera and Ye-ji and Sang-woo on the other.
