Possible Love review – a tale of two couples is finely judged study of exploitation and friendship

Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong brings to Venice his first feature for eight years. It is a finely judged, beautifully acted and rather novelistic work, in which a character at one point actually compares her surroundings to something from a novel. It is expansive and diffuse in terms of storytelling scope and dramatic focus, rich in intelligence while paying its audience the compliment of treating them as intelligent also. There are moments of pure inspiration in the superb flashback scenes of two characters’ early lives, and I rather regretted that these flashbacks were phased out relatively early on and that more was not made of their relationship with the present. Possible Love is perhaps a little contrived and self-aware and unsure how much emphasis to lay on its moments of irony and comedy, but it is made with such fluency and verve.

It is a tale of two couples. Jeon Do-yeon (from Lee’s Secret Sunshine) and Sul Kyung-gu play Mi-ok and Ho-seok, a deeply unhappy married couple from a blue-collar background with a young son. Ho-seok is angry, depressed and struggling with a drinking problem after a catastrophic end to a strike at the factory where he worked. While at the funeral of a colleague of Ho-seok’s, who has taken his own life, he and Mi-ok meet a fashionable and wealthy couple who are making a documentary about the injustice of the way the factory workers were treated. (This couple have a dog instead of a child.)

Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) is the stylishly dressed director, earnestly seeking public grants for her issue-driven documentaries but clearly only able to make independent movies because of her rich hedge fund-guy husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). The film hints that he has something to do with the sale of the factory that treated poor Ho-seok so badly. Shrewd Ye-ji senses that this unhappy working-class couple could make a great story, and with insouciant ruthlessness sets out to befriend Mi-ok, invites them on double-date trips to restaurants and for a vacation trip to Sang-woo’s magnificent family home with its private beach. She also gets drunk with Mi-ok – all part of what Sang-woo calls her “method acting” approach to befriending interviewees, to which she indignantly replies: “I’m trying to love these people.”

Ye-ji intrusively pokes her camera into every corner of the couple’s lives. Mi-ok grasps how therapeutic it could be for them both to talk about their experiences and to have a kind of ownership of what they’ve been through; Ho-seok is much more reluctant to talk, partly because it has been so horrible – and also, perhaps, because he can see that comparing their humble lives to these wealthy people will be intimately painful and destructive.

There is a cool and judicious neutrality to the way Lee treats Ye-ji and Sang-woo, not immediately exploring the satirical potential of their exploitative and predatory pseudo-friendship with Mi-ok and Ho-seok. And in fact this film finishes well before it gets to where another on the same theme might wish to take it – that is, with the documentary getting made and Mi-ok and Ho-seok becoming unwilling celebrities and public figures. Possible Love is far subtler than that. Its hesitant, conditional vein is signalled in the title itself. It is possible that the love between Mi-ok and Ho-seok will rekindle; it is possible that the “love” that Ye-ji shrilly insists she is trying to feel for them will be real. Love is possible – in the future. It is a sombre, bittersweet, elegant movie.