Two kinds of broken marriages have been explored in this year’s cinema, especially through the process of unforced intervention. On the one end stands Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, where an upper-middle-class San Francisco couple invites a deceptively harsh probe into their status quo via an emotionally and sexually liberated couple living just a few feet away from them. On the other hand arrives South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, in which a brutally treated working-class husband, Choi Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and his wife, Ahn Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), wrestle with themselves trying to bridge a social, economic gap between them and wealthy couples. The two cinematic exercises couldn’t be more different from one another in terms of tone and formal treatment, but they both quite similarly yield results that are exciting, shocking, depressing, reassuring and many more things at once. Both films venture into the past following trails of memory — endearing and haunting — and arrive scarred and wounded at a place that still has some hope to offer.
The Korean film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in September, dropped on Netflix this week.
Just as Wilde, Chang-dong (with his first feature in eight years) separates what’s voluntary and what’s coercion with a thin line that exposes multiple forms of human behaviour. He asks plenty of questions across the 164-minute length of his drama by bringing his home country’s social and economic divide to the fore and making empathy a rather loaded sentiment. It’s particularly striking that he chooses to do so partially through the lens of a documentary, where capturing pain and vulnerability for posterity can be an act of guile and deceit. Chang-dong is aware of exploiting the real-life experiences guiding his fictional characters, so he wisely resists plain virtue signalling and elevates his film to a richly layered tale of circumstances and personalities. He does pick his side in the process, after all, but not without allowing each person in his story to reveal the full spectrum of who they are.
Film within a film
Possible Love is, by most means, a spiritual sequel to Chang-dong’s 2022 short film, Heartbeat. In that film, a young boy sneaks out of school at the height of the Covid pandemic to check on his lonely mother, fearing that her depression might drive her to harm herself at home. We are told his father is part of a wide sit-in strike against the laying off of the labour force — including himself — at an organisation called SS Industries, and the aftermath of that event is still felt among its aggrieved.
SS Industries makes way for SP Industries in the new feature film, with the father character, Ho-seok, now present at the centre of the scheme of things and embodying the horrors of corporate apathy through his ghost-like existence. His wife and factory worker, Anh Mi-ok, is living in these shadows and has nearly lost her perspective on life as well, until a well-meaning documentary filmmaker named Lee Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) comes into it.
Ye-ji is married to the ultra-rich, trust-fund-type Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) from Gangnam (the affluent neighbourhood in Seoul), but she insists on securing independent funding on principle, even as she amply utilises his snazzy Porsche and an enviable wardrobe to get things done. It helps that Mi-ok readily trusts and befriends her, and the two hit it off as long-lost sisters; Ye-ji even starts to refer to Mi-ok as ‘sis’ after a point.
While Ho-seok is reluctant, if not outright frightened, to get in front of the camera and discuss the trauma he endured during the strikes, Mi-ok proves herself to be the ideal talking head for the documentary — she is sincere and candid, and isn’t shy to wistfully talk about her and Ho-seok’s charming past or relay the gruelling experience of spending months at the union protests alongside her husband, child and thousands of fellow displaced workers (whom they collectively refer to as “the dead”), and their families.
Chang-dong dedicates a significant chunk of his narrative (co-written with Oh Jung-mi) to highlight labourers’ agitation. Ye-ji’s camera becomes a handy tool for the film’s meta-construct, and the writer duo, drawing from a real-life corporate restructuring in Korea in the late 2000s, mindfully provides scope for many of the agitation’s participants to uninterruptedly share their feelings. These people aren’t important cast members in the conventional sense, but their individual accounts underscore the myriad ways they each have chosen to understand and remember the event. There’s melancholy coming through when one of them says “I’ve never felt such happiness” to describe the solidarity during the strikes. There’s satire in another laid-off worker’s story: “Do not smile when you are angry,” he tells his giggling therapy group, alluding to his decision to let his friends’ “commie” remark pass without any consequence. Ho-seok sits in the same room as him, and for Mi-ok and others who know him, his being there is a big deal in itself. But he still seems far away from what Ye-ji wants: getting him on camera and having him bare his soul.
Keeping it unpredictable
Ye-ji’s bleeding heart for the cause is a major trigger point in Possible Love. In a telling scene, when questioned about her motives and inspirations behind her film, she shares an anecdote from her and Sang-woo’s trip to a palatial hotel in Qatar, where he breaks her bubble with a harsh reminder that the people who worked on the building will never likely be seen or heard. She attaches a childhood memory of a disappearing elephant (Chang-dong’s hat-tip to Murakami?) in a circus act to her speech and talks of her own father, a dry cleaner, being a member of the labourers’ tribe. Sang-woo caustically quips at that, saying her father was still a business owner who hated trade unions and strikes, undermining her sentiments with his most “no harm meant” smile.
Ye-ji, then, gradually becomes the story’s driving force in the most masterful ways. She assumes a middle ground on the socioeconomic canvas, somehow relating to Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s plight while simultaneously catering to her husband’s supposed deep liking for anything culture and arts. She is dismayed when Sang-woo casually remarks that she’s “doing great method acting” to feel what’s in the other couple’s hearts, but something tells us that she is also trying very hard to fit into a world of power and convenience. At other times, whenever she finds herself moved by one of Mi-ok’s evocations of the past, she naturally ends up sharing one of her own, with her guard down; except that she is always circumspect not to leave the camera on.
Sang-woo is evidently craftier than her in the method acting, and it is accentuated further when the couples travel to his beachside vacation home. It is here that Chang-dong does what he does best: elicit mystery through the mundane, and that mystery is channelled through palpable suspicion. One wonders why Ho-seok and Mi-ok are really invited to this familial paradise. One wonders who Sang-woo really is — he is a martial arts expert, a prominent venture capitalist operating in the US market, and also a most congenial host, who will indulge his guests to no end. One surely wonders about the fate of the Ho-seok and Mi-ok relationship, especially given the latter’s stealthy, enigmatic dynamic with Sang-woo himself.
Possible Love is far from being a genre piece, but it has a solid taste for unpredictability which lends it a crackling energy.
The unpredictable nature keeps a possibility of tragedy always within reach, but when the film eventually reaches where it does, Chang-dong makes his every little manoeuvre seem justified. He is in stellar company, of course; his old collaborators Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu. Do-yeon starred in his Secret Sunshine (2014) and Kyung-gu in Peppermint Candy (1999), and both actors are well attuned to his pet themes of loneliness and grief. Possible Love, in fact, is a product of their mesmeric performances, and they together breathe such vitality into their respective characters that the film could be distinctly viewed as a marriage story.
And we know Ye-ji has spotted that too, perfectly aware that, despite everything those two have been through, they are far more respectful and supportive towards each other than she and Sang-woo are. Theirs is arguably the most detailed husband-wife relationship, one that goes beyond the accepted ideas of compatibility, and Chang-dong makes us all privy to it from the vantage point of its quietest observer. And once you watch the film, it won’t be hard to guess who that is.