Possible Love (Ganeunghan Sarang, 가능한 사랑)
Director – Lee Chang Dong – 2026 – South Korea – Cert. 15 tbc – 164m
*****
A filmmaker working on a documentary about workers who’ve been laid off from their companies invites a worker’s wife and her husband to stay at her and her husband’s lavish coastal home – plays the London Film Festival (LFF) Sunday, 11th, Wednesday 14th, Sunday 18th October, then out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 23rd, the London Korean Film Festival on Tuesday, 3rd November, and is on Netflix from Friday, November 6th
The family of laid-off manual worker Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu from A Normal Family, Hur Jin-ho, 2023; Memoir of a Murderer, Won Shin-yeon, 2017; Peppermint Candy, Lee Chang Dong, 1999), his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon from Beasts Clawing at Straws, Kim Yong-hoon, 2020; The Housemaid, Im Sang-soo, 2010) and their young son Cheol (Ha Lim) attend the funeral of one of Ho-seok’s fellow laid-off workmates. The reticent Ho-seok plans to stay in the car, but then goes in to the ceremony some time after the rest of his family and stays for the wake where, against what he’s promised his wife, he drinks, and as he starts to lose it, the pair get into an argument in public.
Cue the appearance of a woman wielding a camera, who starts to record the incident, which doesn’t go down well with the irate Ho-seok. Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong from Parasite, Bong Joon Ho, 2019) subsequently explains to Mi-ok that she is making a documentary about laid-off workers, quickly gaining the wife’s confidence. Ye-ji is keen to get Mi-ok talking to camera about her experience as the wife of a laid-off worker, and Mi-ok is happy to do so.
On camera interviews proceed, one thing leads to another, and the filmmaker invites the couple to stay at her and her husband’s holiday home by the beach, possibly just the sort of break the family need from their impoverished, humdrum, urban existence. Ye-ji ‘s husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung from Escape from Mogadishu, Ryu Seung-wan, 2021; 1987: When That Day Comes, Jang Joon Hwan, 2017; A Dirty Carnival, Yoo Ha, 2006) has been born into wealth and privilege, and has never known what it is to be without money. Although he works, that work sees him do video calls on his laptop at odd hours of the day to clients or partners in different time zones.
What the film maker is really after, however, is not the interview material with the worker’s wife, but with the worker himself. This is going to be no easy task, since the quiet Ho-seok has suffered deep trauma in the course of his working life, the industrial action that followed and his inability to connect with his former fellow workers after they lost their fight with the company. He has retreated deep inside himself, and whatever experience is locked in there with him isn’t going to come out easily.
The rich couple’s home is ornate and spacious, and situated in a small area of jungle next to their own private beach. It’s the perfect place to relax and unwind, and if Ho-seok is ever going to come out of himself, it’s as likely a location as any.
Conversely, the filmmaker’s husband is quite open about his monied background, but never lets on what exactly it is that he does. We see him acting tense in a virtual meeting where there is clearly a lot at stake financially, and we later see him jubilant as he and his consortium have struck a deal and made a financial killing. If Ho-seok and Mi-ok never work out what’s going on, there’s enough information in the film (from background news bulletins) that the audience can work it out, and the scenario is chilling.
Mi-ok’s initial warmth to Ye-ji’s overtures belies the fact that, as in Parasite, a great social divide exists between the two of them and between the two couples and the worlds they inhabit. The former googles a handbag of the latter and is shocked to see its high price online; the latter unthinkingly wears expensive items of clothing which her documentary subject could never afford. It simply doesn’t occur to Ye-ji that this might be an incredibly insensitive thing to do. Like her rich husband, who supports her professional filmmaking as, essentially, his rich wife’s hobby, even though she goes off to meetings to raise funding, she doesn’t seem to realise her position of privilege and its effect on anyone much less well off.
Their new, rich surroundings start to affect the poorer couple as the filmmaker’s interviews proceed. Mi-ok becomes strangely drawn to the handsome and mysterious Sang-woo, to the point where she’s ready to abandon all propriety. The taciturn Ho-seok, too, starts to open up and may even give Ye-ji her the coveted interview.
Dedicated to the memory of Dekalog 10 (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1990), this opens with the commandment Thou Shalt Not Covet. Covetousness is not something that comes up in everyday conversation these days, but given that we increasingly live in a world of haves and have nots, the idea of wanting something which isn’t yours takes on exponential significance.
The poor woman Mi-ok admires the rich woman’s clothing which she could never afford. And increasingly finds the monied husband attractive on many levels.
The film maker Ye-ji wants to be the one exposing social wrongs. Yet her social status perpetuates them without her being aware of the fact.
The rich man is involved in shady strategies to increase his personal financial standing which move in fits and starts from the fringes of the plot to its very heart.
That just leaves the worker Ho-seok who has been abandoned by his company. Seemingly the most reticent of the four adults, he is the one whose trauma we come to appreciate through revelatory flashback, a device not employed in relation to the other three adults here. As his memories of his past experiences pile up, his honesty, his determination to do the right thing by his striking workmates, is disarming.
However, all that is in the past, and the duplicity of those former workmates – who, when he chips,were down, wouldn’t stand up for him as he would for them – has driven him into a refuge deep inside his psyche. He is damaged goods, yet his integrity remains intact. The only character in the tale of whom that can be said.
There is a very different feeling abut this new Lee Chang Dong film from his earlier works such as Burning (2018) or Peppermint Candy. Those earlier films don’t conform to a model of Korean filmmaking to which Possible Love does. That model tends towards small, intimate dramas which make much of their low budget limitations by exploiting anything that happens with the actors during shooting, the highest profile representative of which school of filmmaking is Hong Sang Soo (In Front of Your Face, 2021; The Woman Who Ran, 2020). Possible Love doesn’t feel like a low budget production, but it feels more like these films than his earlier works do.
In the end, all this is a searing indictment of the social systems in which we all, inevitably, participate; systems that control and define us. How we move on from those, when they’re so deeply entrenched in present day culture and society, is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, wherever you find yourself in the social pile, this strikes some disturbing chords. See it.
Possible Love plays the London Film Festival (LFF) Sunday, 11th, Wednesday 14th, Sunday 18th October, then out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 23rd, the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) on Tuesday, 3rd November, and is on Netflix from Friday, November 6th.
Trailer: