Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love," which won the Special Jury Prize, or Silver Lion, at this year's Venice International Film Festival, follows four people: documentary director Yeji (Jo Yeo-jeong) and her wealthy husband Sangwoo (Jo In-sung), and laid-off worker Hoseok (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife Miok (Jeon Do-yeon). The film poses a weighty question about people from different classes — whether love, not just understanding, is possible between them — and about the dignity and worth of human beings and of love itself. It is also a work that invites viewers to arrive at their own readings of the question it raises.
Today I want to look at "possible love" through Hoseok, the one among the four whose range of choices in love would seem the narrowest.
Hoseok was a permanent welder at SP Heavy Industries. But he lost his job in mass layoffs. There was a time he could not walk because of post-traumatic stress disorder, and he is still haunted by the trauma of being dismissed.
He met Miok when he was 18. She was 16 at the time. There was nothing you could call a date; they simply met. That is how they became a couple, and they broke up, too. Then, when Miok was working at a sewing factory in Seoul in her third year of high school and Hoseok was in the military, the two met again.
On leave from his military service, Hoseok combs Seoul and finds Miok. He then takes her out of the factory. The place the two go for their first date is Wolmido.
And yet they do nothing there. They do not ride the amusement rides, they do not eat anything good. They simply look at the moon together. They married, got a home of their own and had a son, Cheol. They built an ordinary family with nothing special about it. Hoseok lived on as an ordinary breadwinner.
Then he is laid off. Yeji comes to him, saying she will make a documentary about the dismissed workers. Miok agrees to take part, but Hoseok does not. Yeji tries to make him the central figure, but Hoseok refuses to appear to the end. And so Hoseok, though the protagonist of the film, appears in it almost like an invisible man.
Considering the "age of the end of labor" that Lee described as the film's message, Hoseok's way of existing comes into even sharper focus. He seems to stand as both a symbol and a metaphor for the worker.
He is a worker who exists and does not exist. A person who plainly exists, yet who at some point has been erased from society. On the factory floor he was clearly a needed worker, but the moment he is dismissed, his presence grows faint. Even in the documentary about his own story, he himself never appears before the camera.
Sul Kyung-gu plays that rendered-invisible worker. You wonder whether it can be done. The Sul Kyung-gu performances we have seen until now were intense. He pushed emotion to its extremes, showed charisma and at times went as far as madness.
Hoseok is the exact opposite. He does not let his emotions explode. He does not explain his wounds. He does not try to assert a presence. If anything, he looks like a man being erased from the frame little by little.
And Sul does it. Yet this was a performance possible only because it was Sul. He sets down the intensity and erases even his own presence to play a worker turned invisible. And so he lingers all the more intensely. It makes you wonder whether the intensity of an unseen presence is something an actor can even perform.
While marveling at Sul's performance, a line Yeji says about Hoseok in the film came to mind. "He's special. Like the only one of his kind in this country."
That line could be applied, word for word, to Sul's acting — that he gave "a singular performance only Sul Kyung-gu could give." Sul shed tears while attending the Venice festival, and after seeing the film I felt I understood why.
And in speaking of Hoseok, love is the one thing that cannot be left out. Of the four, his love is the most ardent, the purest, the freshest.
Perhaps in "Possible Love," Hoseok is the one with the fewest options in love. Economically, of course, that is so. He has less than Sangwoo. There is not much in life he gets to choose. In the end, the layoff shakes the very foundation of his life, economically and socially.
But love is a different matter. When he first met Miok at 18, Hoseok picked a green apple that had not even finished growing, polished it until it shone and shyly gave it to her in secret. On leave from the army, he combed Seoul to find her. And the place he took her after leading her out of the factory was Wolmido.
He has less than Sangwoo, but perhaps in the capacity to love purely, Hoseok is the largest of them all. Because he is not a man who could love thanks to having much, but a man who, even without much, never let go of loving someone to the very end.
That is why watching Hoseok makes you think again less about "possible love" than about love itself.
Yeon Seung's Entertainment Talk
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