"Imagination cannot defeat reality."
Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love," unveiled for the first time at a press screening on the 21st, is being praised as a work that proves "the power of reality" through literary sensibility, deep insight and self-reflection. The film, which won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at this year's Venice International Film Festival, takes mass layoffs at a large corporation as its starting point and follows wealthy husband Sang-woo (Jo In-sung) and his wife Ye-ji (Jo Yeo-jeong), a documentary director, as they set out to record the story of laid-off worker Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon).
Through four characters who grow closer as Ye-ji films her documentary, the director renders in his distinctive literary realism the layered ways in which economic class governs human thought and behavior and defines relationships. Ho-seok, who had worked as a permanent welder at a large company and found small, ordinary happiness in his life, falls into deep despair after losing not only his income but his sense of self, left an empty shell.
Yet the film places not Ho-seok's suffering but his wife Mi-ok at the forefront, with Ye-ji choosing to follow Mi-ok's gaze. This is read as a powerful metaphor for what the director calls the "end of labor" era. Although Ho-seok, the laid-off worker, is the protagonist, he is directed for long stretches as though he were an invisible man who does not exist. The disappearance of labor and of workers themselves is reproduced, by this reading, through a Ho-seok who exists only as an "invisible man."
At a press conference after the screening, Sul Kyung-gu said Ho-seok "was not well off, but within those limits he did his best at work that society recognized as valuable, living a modest and ordinary life in which he felt small happiness." He added: "I portrayed a man whose sense of self was completely shattered after being laid off, who carries a tangle of shame, guilt and anger, who feels inferior and shrinks into himself, and who would also have felt a kind of resistance upon meeting Sang-woo and his wife."
The scenes in which Ho-seok and other laid-off workers undergo psychological counseling may be the message the director most wanted to convey. The sequence in which Ho-seok, who had refused counseling, joins the "dead" — the laid-off workers — in a strike and unburdens himself of the wounds, shame and despair he suffered in being dismissed is seen as reaffirming the power of documentary.
At first Ho-seok stubbornly refuses both the documentary filming and the counseling. But after a chance encounter at a bakery with a former colleague who fails to recognize him, he goes through inner conflict and psychological change. In the counseling he has finally begun, Mi-ok describes him as "a person whose insides you cannot read," yet his mind is filled with psychological trauma that even Ho-seok himself cannot sort out and put into words. Having at last faced his own pain, Ho-seok accepts an invitation to the vacation home of Ye-ji and Sang-woo, and the film enters a different phase — beginning with the four of them leaving for a holiday at Sang-woo's country house.
Though the documentary was meant to be about Ho-seok, Ye-ji also becomes interested in Mi-ok's story. Sharing trivial things — childhood, romances and the rest — the two grow close. At the vacation home, where the class that separates them comes from and what it looks like are laid bare. Rather than being violent or explicit, the scene maximizes the film's beauty through the director's characteristically literary and contemplative direction.
Throughout the film, Mi-ok, with a pure and clear face, speaks without artifice about her courtship, about Ho-seok and about her family. Forty-four years old, having come to Seoul in her final year of high school to work in a factory and still doing hard labor, Mi-ok is harmless and pure. Unlike her husband, who lost his sense of self along with his job, she is solid. She appears to be the film's protagonist and narrator. Jeon Do-yeon said of Mi-ok: "Money and class can break down a person's values and strip away a person's worth, but Mi-ok is a character who protects her own worth against them." She added: "In the end it comes down to values, and I portrayed a person who protects her own worth and her family's worth without being affected by money and class."
While the film raises weighty questions — laid-off workers, the end-of-labor era, economic class — it also renders the small stories of ordinary people, from the moment 16-year-old Mi-ok and 18-year-old Ho-seok first met through their heady courtship and married life, like a wistful work of literary fiction. The scene in which Mi-ok and Ho-seok look up at the moon is being called the most beautiful literary achievement rendered on screen.
The film holds the anguish and self-examination of a director who began preparing it a decade ago and then gave it up, recalling Yun Dong-ju's poem "Confession": whether one can love a person of a different class and put that into a work, and whether using another's pain in the name of art is defensible. "The reason I started preparing this story and then set it aside was that I had no confidence in myself, no certainty that I had the right to tell it honestly," the director said. "Time passed, my fundamental view of labor itself changed, and as the story of the documentary director and her husband came together with it, the story became possible." He added: "I thought about the ethical question, or the attitude of a person who makes films. I put into the film my struggle over whether one can tell other people's stories without using their lives as material for a movie."
Through these four characters, the director poses a heavy, aching question: whether, setting aside class and identity built of varied and complex layers, we can truly love one another. "I cannot help asking whether it is actually possible to love — really to love, not as method acting."
Rated for adults only. In theaters on the 23rd; on Netflix on Nov. 6.
