‘Possible Love’ review: Korean drama has four of the best performances of the year: NPR
Sul Kyung-gu as Ho-seok, left, Jeon Do-yeon as Mi-ok, Cho Yeo-jeong as Ye-ji, Zo In-sung as Sang-woo in Love possible. The film opens in select theaters on Friday and begins streaming on Netflix on November 6.
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Netflix
Writer-director Lee Chang-dong belongs to a rare breed of filmmakers who have never made anything other than a great film. It’s no surprise that there’s sometimes a long wait between these films: eight years have passed since his previous installment, the chilling psychological thriller. Burning.
It’s wonderful to have him back with a new film, Love is possiblewhich tells a story that has been weighing on him for some time. The initiative was inspired by an incident in 2009, when a Korean car factory laid off a third of its workforce. The metalworkers’ union organized a strike which was brutally suppressed by the police. Many workers subsequently committed suicide.
The film, which director Lee co-wrote with Oh Jung-mi, follows a married couple two years after a similar tragedy rocks their small industrial town. Sul Kyung-gu plays a welder named Ho-seok, one of many workers laid off from a factory due to a major restructuring.
Ho-seok now has another metalworking job elsewhere, but the pain of his dismissal lingers and he has become an alcoholic. His wife, Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon, works at a company that makes masks. She is the warm glue that unites the family; they also have a young son.
Early on, the couple meets a woman named Ye-ji, an aspiring filmmaker who is filming a documentary about the layoffs. Ye-ji wants them both to appear in the film, but only Mi-ok is willing to be interviewed. She reveals a lot about her past on camera: we see flashbacks of her with her mother, who was ashamed and even angry at her working-class roots. We also see the exciting day she and Ho-seok first met, when they were teenagers.
Ye-ji also shares a little about herself, including how she met her very handsome and very wealthy hedge fund investor type husband. But even as the two women strike up a friendship, the flow of information here is largely one-way. The film never lets us forget that their bond is governed by stark differences of class, wealth and power. Ye-ji’s kindness, as genuine as it may seem, is conditional on Mi-ok’s continued participation in her project.
At times, Love is possible can act as a treatise on documentary ethics. But while Ye-ji’s methods certainly deserve criticism, director Lee also gets heavily involved. His gently hand-held camerawork sometimes blurs in Ye-ji’s footage, making it hard to tell whose perspective we’re seeing from. Lee seems to recognize that both fictional and non-fictional narratives have their manipulations, and he is determined to do well with the real events and real-life issues on which he draws. Love is possible itself opens in the same month that its distributor, Netflix, laid off a staggering 6% of its global workforce.
There’s a documentary quality to some of the film’s most emotional moments, which take place during a group counseling session for laid-off workers and their spouses. We hear them talk about the first joyful days of the strike, the feeling of solidarity they felt before the end of the strike. Lee’s previous films, such as Oasis And Peppermint Candieshave often portrayed misfits and outcasts. In Love is possibleit explores a different type of alienation, one that results from the breakdown of a once great community.
Since premiering at festivals earlier this fall, Love is possible has attracted many comparisons with Parasiteanother class-conscious Korean drama about two families. Cho Yeo-jeong, who played the role of the rich wife in Parasiteis just as great as Ye-ji, the rich wife in this film. However, the two films are more different than similar. Or Parasite was a virtuoso Hitchcockian thriller, Love is possible has an almost romantic richness and depth of character. It also features four of the best performances of the year.
As Ye-ji’s husband, Zo In-sung is such a good mix of condescension and charm that you might not recognize him from the recent gross-out monster movie. Hope. And then there are the leads, Sul and Jeon, who both did some of their best work in Lee’s previous films, and who do some of their best work again here. As the depressed and drunken Ho-seok, Sul gives a quietly implosive and deeply mysterious performance; he continues to reveal layers of himself until the final moments.
As for his wife, Mi-ok, she is quite simply one of the most complex and memorable characters you will see in a film this year. Remarkably, she did not give in to despair. She meets every challenge with a playful, mischievous sense, and although she is often exasperated with her husband, even the way she berates him makes clear the depth of their bond. The title of Love is possible wonders if love can survive life’s difficulties. For all their deeply human weaknesses, Ho-seok and Mi-ok answer this question with a resounding yes.
