row Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Possible Love
(Ganeunghan Sarang,
가능한 사랑)

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.… Read the rest

The Middle Man

Director – Bent Hamer – 2021 – Norway, Denmark, Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland – Cert. 15 – 95m

****

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but… A man in a heartland American town becomes a middle man, whose job it is to convey bad news to local people – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 10th

Curiously for an English language film set in a small American town, this one was funded by a variety of European countries and Canada. While its visuals clearly owe much to the films of David Lynch, particularly Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997) with their heavy night time interiors filled with dark, impenetrable black spaces, it eschews the over the top moments of sex and violence with which Lynch peppers these films with something much less jocular and more deadpan. Like Lynch it feels distinctly odd, yet in a completely different way. Unlike those films, it’s adapted from (part of) a novel.

Opening images. Factories in a town belch smoke. A small, industrial town on a river. This is Karmack, USA.

Frank Farrelli (Pål Sverre Hagen) is the second interviewee by the three person panel (the local sheriff, pastor and doctor played respectively by Paul Gross, Nicholas Bro and Canadian regular Don McKellar) for the town’s job of middle man, the person who has to deliver bad news, e.g.… Read the rest