‘Possible Love’ movie review: Lee Chang-dong’s exquisitely layered study of covetousness

It is through the works of filmmakers like Lee Chang-dong that I have started to better understand and appreciate the etymology of the word ‘auteur’ — that rare writerly sensibility so singular that every frame seems to bear the imprint of an unmistakable literary temperament that makes cinema feel authored in the most intimate sense of the word.

My second encounter with the Korean auteur after his masterful Burning (2018) was another reminder that few contemporary filmmakers understand the anatomy of modern human misery with quite this much formal intelligence. Led by one of the year’s most unforgettable ensembles, featuring Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong, Possible Love won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, and has been selected as South Korea’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards.

The film opens by invoking the Tenth Commandment, borrowing its dedication to the memory of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog 10. Rather than attempting a remake, Lee takes the injunction against covetousness and subjects it to a more uncomfortable interrogation, bringing two married couples from opposite ends of South Korea’s economic spectrum into an increasingly fraught entanglement following the violent suppression of a factory workers’ strike.

On one side are Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), a taciturn factory worker whose life has unravelled following his dismissal and a brutal police assault during a workers’ strike, and Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), his spirited wife, who has spent the intervening years watching the man she fell in love with recede into depression, resentment and alcoholism.

On the other are Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an aspiring documentarian who sees their misfortune as the subject of her next film, and Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), her fabulously wealthy, generationally privileged husband. Much as he did in Burning, Lee takes an almost novelistic interest in the strange intimacies that emerge when these disparate lives begin to overlap.

But he is equally attentive to the social/class hierarchies of these encounters, letting seemingly innocuous exchanges, or displays of affluence and unspoken resentments, contaminate the possibility of genuine human connection.

It is fascinating to watch Lee make the proximity of wealth such a destabilising experience for Mi-ok — Jeon Do-yeon is an absolute stunner throughout, bringing an irrepressible, almost mischievous vitality to her performance — whose growing attachment to Ye-ji is complicated by an acute awareness of everything her new friend takes for granted.

The designer handbag she furtively photographs, the clothes she gently reprimands Ye-ji for wearing around impoverished workers, or the almost girlish fascination with her friend’s impossibly handsome husband; these are not incidental manifestations of covetousness so much as the small, humiliating negotiations of someone suddenly made conscious of the limits of their own existence.

Lee is too astute to treat envy as a private moral deficiency when its objects are so conspicuously distributed along lines of economic privilege. Ye-ji and Mi-ok might have different ideas of what constitutes a desirable life, but as the iconic LCD (Lee Chang-dong) Soundsystem reminds us, sometimes you have to simply ‘Covet Yrslf Clean’.

What is most delicious is the willingness to let the two couples trespass upon each other’s worlds, temporarily suspending the social arrangements. But there is no sense of levelling here, and certainly no redemptive fantasy in which a weekend at a seaside mansion dissolves the material antagonisms of class.

The asymmetry survives every convivial dinner or drunken confession; even, the very hospitality often feels like another instrument of condescension. Lee knows that the cruellest indignity of late capitalism may not be that the poor cannot possess what the wealthy have, but that they are repeatedly invited to experience its pleasures without ever being allowed to partake freely.

But what Lee is especially unwilling to do is afford Ho-seok the consolations of victimhood. His despondency has calcified into something uglier than sadness: an almost pathological withdrawal from the world, punctuated by flashes of aggression and an inability to recognise the person his wife is still trying desperately to reach.

Having lost considerably more than a factory job, Ho-seok has been dispossessed of the social identity through which he understood his own dignity and masculine worth. His harrowing final-act interview lays bare the psychic wreckage of being stranded in the aftermath of a defeated political imagination, unable to mourn what was lost, yet equally incapable of recovering the emancipatory promise that once made struggle conceivable.

He is neither an exemplary proletarian martyr nor an agreeable casualty of corporate brutality, but a damaged, resentful man whose suffering frequently spills over onto those closest to him. Nevertheless, Lee’s empathy remains boundless.

He knows that economic violence does not produce photogenic victims, and that some injuries cannot be converted into inspirational narratives of recovery. He also seems entirely disillusioned in the reassuring directedness of progressive resistance, wherein suffering must eventually yield some historical dividend.

Perhaps most intoxicating is Lee’s incredible capacity to make seemingly negligible details accrue remarkable emotional and thematic consequence. The distinction between the workers who retained their jobs as “the living” and those made redundant as “the dead” is disconcerting enough, but Lee keeps finding stranger, more intimate ways of allowing that original violence to metastasise through the film — whether that is the drinking that continually circles back to Ho-seok’s trauma, the contrasting physicality of Cheol’s Taekwondo lessons, the police whistle that connects the brutality of the...