"Imagination cannot defeat reality."
"Possible Love," the new film by director Lee Chang-dong, was shown to the press for the first time on the 21st, drawing praise as a masterwork that proves the power of reality through literary sensibility, insight into life and self-reflection. The film, which won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at this year's Venice International Film Festival, takes mass layoffs at a large corporation as its starting point. It follows a wealthy husband, Sang-woo (Jo In-sung), and his wife, a documentary director (Cho Yeo-jeong), as they set out to record the story of a laid-off worker, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and his wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon).
Through four characters who grow closer over the course of the documentary shoot, Lee uses his signature literary realism to show how economic class governs thought and behavior and defines relationships between people. Ho-seok, a welder who had held a permanent position at a large company and enjoyed a modest but contented life, sinks into despair after losing not only his income but his very sense of identity. Here the film breaks with convention. Rather than centering Ho-seok's suffering, it places his wife, Mi-ok, in the foreground and follows her point of view. Critics read this as a powerful metaphor for what the director has called the age of the end of labor. Ho-seok is the protagonist, yet he is staged as if he were an invisible man who does not exist. The invisible man of an age without work is realized by presenting a worker who is there as though he were not. Sul drew acclaim for portraying a man who exists and yet appears not to, in what reviewers called a performance unlike any other in the world.
The film carries the full weight of the anguish and self-examination of a director who began preparing it a decade ago before setting it aside, and reviewers have likened it to Yun Dong-ju's poem "Confession." It turns on questions the director asks of himself: whether one can wholly love a person of a different class and hold that person within a work of art, and whether making art becomes a pretext for using another person's pain. Through its four very different characters, the film poses a heavy, aching question — whether people can break free of the many tangled bonds of class and truly love one another. It opens in theaters on the 23rd and arrives on Netflix on Nov. 6.
