‘Possible Love’ San Sebastian Review: Lee Chang-dong Turns The Camera’s Gaze Into A Question Of Class

Making films — documentary or fiction — about the working class or the poor is usually a privilege afforded to people far more comfortable, economically, than the subjects they’re portraying. That socioeconomic disconnect is baked into the logic of the film industry itself, an art form that habitually presents worlds and problems that have nothing to do with the lives of the people making the films. It’s into that gray zone that Lee Chang-dong wades with Possible Love, his new and awarded film, which also functions as a reflection on —and response to— Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s crueler, more direct study of class conflict in contemporary Korea.

If in Bong’s film the protagonists, members of Seoul’s underclass, longed for the lives of the rich and schemed their way into their houses, here something like the opposite happens: this story follows a documentary director and her millionaire husband as they produce a film about the fallout of mass layoffs in Korea. Their focus lands on SP Steel, a company that fired a large share of its workforce and violently crushed a strike by its employees. Their research leads them to a couple still living with the consequences of those events.

The documentary’s director, Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong, of Parasite), befriends and wins remarkably candid testimony from Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon, of Secret Sunshine), the wife of Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu, of Peppermint Candy), an employee brutally fired from the plant. Mi-ok wants to help her depressed, withdrawn, at times aggressive husband work through what happened by speaking to Ye-ji’s camera, almost as a form of therapy. But Ho-seok, though he reluctantly allows a small crew to follow the family everywhere, refuses to talk. He’d rather stay silent — and, at times, drink more than he should, with unpredictable results.

It’s obvious from their very first meeting —and even clearer once we get to know Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), the documentarian’s polished, elegant husband— that the class gap between the people behind the camera and the people in front of it is enormous. There’s something both funny and sad in watching Mi-ok stare, disbelieving, at the price tag on the director’s handbag, or take in the refinement of her clothes. But Ye-ji genuinely seems moved by the workers’ struggle and by the human toll of unemployment in this era of corporate downsizing and looming AI takeover. And the bond between the two women deepens, gradually pushing their husbands to the margins of the story.

Possible Love traces the stages, the shifting moods and intensities of that four-way relationship, making room to explore each character’s private life — including that of Cheol, Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s ten-year-old son, who’s absorbing the fallout of the family crisis and his father’s increasingly harsh, distant presence. Between Mi-ok’s on-camera testimony, the social encounters and mismatches —dinners, walks, visits back and forth between the two households— and flashbacks to the «working-class couple’s» history and the brutal labor conflict they lived through, Lee Chang-dong builds a social drama about class collisions, about an impossible friendship mediated by cameras and everything that mediation implies about exploitation.

The director of Burning pushes past the classic rich-versus-poor dialectic, introducing —through the film-within-a-film device— an element that muddies and complicates the whole equation. Why does Ye-ji, the director, want to make a documentary about a kind of labor abuse that has nothing to do with her own life, a world of hardship utterly foreign to her? And what makes Mi-ok go along with it, without weighing the risks to her family? What’s smart about Lee’s approach is that it never tips into satire, and —save for a couple of moments— never oversimplifies. Ye-ji may well be making her film out of genuine interest and real concern for the issue, but that doesn’t stop her from crossing the line from that nobility into exploiting someone else’s suffering. Isn’t what she’s ultimately doing to this family, in the end, not so different from what the company did to them when it threw them out onto the street?

Lee isn’t after easy or reassuring answers. Instead, he complicates the relationship through the characters’ own behavior and choices — visible in the mounting tension between Mi-ok and Sang-woo, and in the difficult moments the anguished Ho-seok has to live through. Hearing him, at one point, finally let go and put into words what he feels about everything he’s been through —at work, but also outside it, in his often uncomfortable run-ins with former coworkers— is one of the most moving and profound passages in this extraordinary Korean film. Like Bong did in Parasite, Lee has every element in hand to cut loose into dark comedy. But he (almost) doesn’t. He’d rather ease off the throttle by a notch or two, and let the feelings, the fears, the contradictions and the pain of people fighting not to «fall» out of the world simply flow. Here, the parasites are everyone else.