‘Fighting an impossible fight is the only way to reclaim dignity’: Lee Chang-dong on class warfare and his searing Oscar contender

A quintessential 21st-century horror story: a private equity firm has set its sights on your company. That’s the premise behind director Lee Chang-dong’s new film, Possible Love, and the idea for it first came more than a decade ago, when mass layoffs resulted in a standoff that “fundamentally changed the Korean labour movement”.

In 2009, workers at Ssangyong Motors company protested against plans to lay off between 37 and 43% of the workforce, staging a historic 77-day strike and occupation of the factory that was eventually broken up by riot police. “Until that point in time in Korea, labourers’ rights were widely accepted,” Lee says, speaking through an interpreter in a central London hotel; “however, afterwards, the basic rights of labourers changed; to the public, they couldn’t be seen as more important than market profitability or corporate competitiveness.”

At the time, Lee shelved the project. “The more I examined the pain of these individuals” – after the violent crackdown on the Ssangyong Motors strike, there were several suicides, and reports of long-term mental health issues – “I constantly asked myself: am I worthy of telling this story? And if I am, how do I tell it? Do I stand close to the workers, or keep my distance?” Later he and his co-writer Oh Jung-mi, wrote “many different” scripts, including one with post-apocalyptic elements, before Oh suggested introducing a character who is a documentary film-maker, thereby finding a way to work in Lee’s ambivalence about his intentions.

The result is a sharply observed Russian doll of a film that places a narrative about “labour and its relationship to capital” within a broader story about the ethics of film-making, and the tensions and desires that emerge when a working-class couple collide with an astronomically wealthy one. It has, like many of Lee’s previous films, been received to great acclaim: it recently won the grand jury prize at Venice film festival, and has been hailed by critics as one of the best films of the year.

The film’s opening title shows the 10th commandment, “Thou shalt not covet”. You can already guess that it will be swiftly broken. Soon we see the depressed Ho-seok, who has been fired from his job at a metal factory, reprimanding his free-spirited wife Mi-ok for caring about her clothes. They’re on their way to a funeral of Ho-seok’s former colleague, who killed himself after being made redundant, and meet the ambitious film-maker Lee Ye-ji and her financier husband Sang-woo. They radiate the kind of glow afforded by wealth. After a stay at a luxury resort in Qatar made Ye-ji reflect on the nature of hidden labour, she’s making a film about the state of labour in Korea, and believes she’s found her ideal subjects; if only Ho-seok, who refuses to go to therapy let alone talk about his experiences in front of a camera, would agree.

Since his first feature in 1997, Lee, now 72, has made luminous yet unsparing films about disempowered people swept up in brutal economic and political circumstances: his protagonists include blue-collar workers, ex-prisoners, people with disabilities. In his previous film Burning, an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, a poor writer battles for a woman’s affections with a wealthier rival. (Possible Love brings together two lead actors from Lee’s most acclaimed films; Secret Sunshine’s Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu who starred Peppermint Candy and Oasis.) Class tensions bristle throughout his work: now, however, he’s wondering whether we’ve outstripped the usefulness of the term.

“It’s difficult to use the word ‘class’ because it is so vast,” he says of the difference between the couples in Possible Love. He describes Sang-woo, who moves about the world with possessive ease, an allure and emptiness, as a “symbol of capital … It’s not even that Sang-woo is a wealthy man. It’s about how he is capable of moving and controlling a huge amount of capital. And that capital creates further wealth. It’s almost as if you can’t really grasp how much wealth it creates. It’s just something of a different dimension.” At the same time, “I didn’t want to show that the two couples belong to completely different worlds, because they do live in the same world.” It is, after all, the abstract financial machinations of people like Sang-woo that materially overturn the lives of people like Ho-seok. Making the characters interact together at restaurants, their homes, and on a charged summer holiday “was going to naturally bring out the tension, the hidden power difference between them. There is a gap that just cannot be crossed.”

The film exposes the audience to many different kinds of looking: we are shown Ye-ji’s documentary footage; a CCTV feed; newsreel-style clips of a violent police crackdown on a workers’ strike. Lee wanted to study the “issue of the gaze”; “the ethics of capturing and observing the lives and pain of others”. Ye-ji has a habit of holding her camera up at inappropriate moments, often to the discomfort of Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s young son, Cheol. I wonder if she’s supposed to be a sympathetic character. “Anyone who’s really hardworking, they tend to overdo it,” Lee says. He feels a “closeness” to her, “and cameras by their nature search for drama.” Can there ever be equality between a film-maker and their subject? “It’s very hard to be equal because the person holding the camera without even realising it is given power. And it’s a one-sided relationship.”

In his telling, Lee became a film-maker almost by accident. He was a writer in 1980s South Korea, then under a military government, feeling called to draw attention to human suffering: “That was our moral responsibility.” As the country moved towards democracy and into the new century, he felt that although the suffering still remained, “that moral responsibility among people in literature began to disappear. Literature that dealt with the close pains of reality were treated as if they were expired goods. I was disappointed with that change.” He took up screenwriting to try something new, before working as an assistant director, “because I almost wanted to punish myself in a way, make myself go through something very tough. I worked so hard at it that people around me were moved, and they said: ‘Oh, you should be a film-maker.’”

South Korean films today are known globally for their confronting depictions of capitalism, though unlike, say, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (which also features a class divide between two families) or Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (also about the misery of corporate layoffs), Lee’s characters are not schemers who attain pyrrhic, depraved victory against the system. We instead are often left to observe how they are marginalised by the world around them; we witness their small disappointments, the cruelties they endure, and how they strain to hold on to their hopes.

Yet his films also reveal the small but significant moments of solace and grace these characters find: in nature, other people, or their own willpower. Lee has previously described his films as stories about people taking on impossible fights against large, impenetrable entities. “However, despite that, I think the fight itself has meaning. I think these fights the individuals take on against the world is quite possibly the only way they are able to reclaim dignity. Regardless of your chances of winning, I think the fight itself is significant and meaningful.”

You could say that his latest film was made after a fight of sorts. Lee struggled to find domestic funding for the film, given the “structural crisis” facing the Korean industry, caused by the economic losses from a strict Covid 19 lockdown, and the rise of streaming services. Netflix stepped in to fund it, granting the film a theatrical release in some countries worldwide. “The character Ye-ji has a wealthy husband. She lives with someone who holds that capital but still tries her best to be independent,” Lee says. (Her husband, Sang-woo, somewhat disparagingly describes an independent film as a “film independent of capital”; “I thought it would be very amusing to have him say that line,” says Lee.) “I feel like she and I are in the same shoes. I am also dependent on capital to get my films made. You could say that I am also someone who is married to capital, but trying to protect my own voice, which I almost think is the fate of all film-makers.”

After its victory at Venice, there are already whispers about the Oscars; it is South Korea’s submission for best international feature. I ask what success means to him. “I’ve always made films wanting to connect with audiences. It’s always meaningful for me when my audiences accept the questions that I ask through my films and try to find their own answers. And hopefully that leads to a very small change in their lives.” It’s a fitting answer for a film-maker who has long portrayed the subtle acts of resistance people can mount against a hostile world; who finds in small changes, causes for hope.

Possible Love is in cinemas now, and on Netflix November 6.