Venice: Lee Chang-dong's Oscar submission "Possible Love"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

POSSIBLE LOVE

It took Lee Chang-dong more than ten years to write Possible Love, after the horrifying police repression of laid-off SsangYong Motor workers in 2009 made him want to tackle the way inequality in Korean society is built around work, and around the pride or shame attached to having or losing a good job. After seeing the result, it is difficult not to marvel that it took him only ten years to write one of the most flawless and powerful films of the last decade. Every scene across its 164-minute running time works like an instrument in a concert, sometimes with almost diabolical precision, and as an homage to Kieślowski’s Dekalog (to which it is dedicated) and similarly intent on encompassing both the moral dilemmas of ordinary life and the capitalist structures surrounding them...

At first, Possible Love seems to be “only” about work as the battleground between greedy corporations and workers who have themselves internalized the capitalist idea that personal worth is inseparable from productivity; this is precisely why workers fight so fiercely when someone tries to take that dignity away for the sake of a little more profit. Yet this decisive battle is already over when the film begins: 40% of the workforce at a major company has been fired ahead of its sale to international investors. Those who lost their jobs call themselves “the dead,” afraid of meeting “the living” in the elevator of their apartment building. Some have been so scarred by what happened that they have killed themselves. The film opens at the funeral of one such man, with another laid-off husband unable even to face the ceremony alongside his family.

From the beginning, however, Lee introduces another framework. A documentary filmmaker records the funeral and the psychological support meetings of “the dead,” turning their suffering into a movie. The device reminded me of Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, a prize winner earlier this year at Cannes, in the way it places an almost academic, video-essay framework around the drama. The documentary is supposedly independently financed (“independent from what?” asks its female protagonist, “from money,” replies the filmmaker’s husband) but Lee keeps complicating the distinction between observer and observed. The director is wealthy now, certainly much wealthier than the couple whose lives she enters as both filmmaker and friend, although her own memories include being an underpaid worker in Chicago. Her husband comes from a genuinely affluent, prominent family and once risked his inheritance to marry her. Yet wealth, possessions and status remain deliberately slippery in what gradually reveals itself as Lee’s variation on “Thou shalt not covet.” The same moon shines on different lives, but that does not mean those lives are experienced equally. Even something as apparently neutral as having practiced taekwondo in high school becomes another marker of class difference. In Lee Chang-dong’s cinema, people from different social strata cannot experience the same things in quite the same way.

Led by an extraordinarily layered and vivid Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine, The Housemaid), who can locate humor and teasing inside despair and desperation inside humor (any serious awards conversation that excludes her would feel incomplete), Possible Lovegradually reveals what happened at the factory. Lee does not shy away from the politics of it when the time comes to show what the strike and the occupation of the factory ultimately led to. After the protests that gave women a voice and their first taste of being politically relevant and present, first comes the owners’ psychological warfare, then a repression ordered by the government through brutal police violence, and finally the absurdity of being branded a communist simply because you tried to get your job back, learning to smile politely because smiling apparently makes you look less communist. Television footage and fragments from the documentary mingle with some astonishing formal choices, including a first-person shot for perhaps the film’s most heartbreaking betrayal: that of the colleague you tried to protect. Even after more than 100 minutes, however, Lee is still withholding essential pieces. Deeply struggling in his new, less prestigious job, the laid-off husband played by Sol Kyung-gu still refuses both psychological help and the filmmaker’s request for an interview. The audience has seen enough scenes of him lashing out at his wife and being almost unable to contain the anger inside him to sense the damage done to him without yet understanding its full shape.

Set largely at the wealthy family’s luxurious seaside house, the third and final act of Possible Love pushes the film from exceptional to simply phenomenal. In the house where he grew up as a kid, an exclusive retreat far from the world, the wealthy husband finally feels free to reveal himself, and what a piece of work he turns out to be, thanks to Jo In-sung’s remarkably affable way of delivering the most brutal takes on other people’s reality as someone who has never been, and never will be, truly affected by it (not to mention the subtle but undeniable suggestion that he might be more involved in the story than simply being a spectator and helper to his filmmaker wife). Revealing more about the third act would be sacrilegious, considering Lee begins unleashing one extraordinary scene after another. Some land like slaps, quiet in their execution but abruptly changing the meaning of something we thought we understood, as does the couple trying to find a way to love and live again. A childhood memory whose class implications have not been fully grasped for decades shocks the protagonist into truly understanding her own mother. Later an act of rebellious freedom from her steals from the rich husband his perceived monopoly on behaving as though the world belongs to him. At last, a revelation under the full moon exposes how the wealthy couple’s almost entomological curiosity about their guests has never disappeared. Above all, the audience gasps when a simple sound in a quiet, almost static scene suddenly clarifies the feudal nature of class relationships extending back into childhood, making the blood run cold. The discarded bag of chips floating poetically outside a window near the beginning — the only detail that feels pretentious or unnecessary — eventually acquires its own meaning at the very end.

I am extremely stingy with five-star ratings, so I subjected myself to a second 164-minute screening (an act bordering on madness during a festival as packed as Venice). Being aware from the beginning of all the implications and secrets of this double-marriage story only made the precision of Lee’s construction more apparent. Possible Love is an extraordinary cinematic achievement, a formidable Golden Lion contender, but above all one of those rare festival films that instantly feels like a discovery we will still be discussing years from now.