“Possible Love” is a hard movie to place. Lee Chang-dong’s festival feature has a simple enough premise: a laid-off worker and his life become intertwined with a documentarian and her husband as one family becomes the subject of the other’s latest feature.
But this logline does a disservice to the quiet complexity bursting from Lee’s latest. At nearly three hours in length, “Possible Love” is a brilliant meditation on class, trauma, truth and, as the title implies, love itself — and its limitations.
“As (Sul) Kyung-gu said in Venice, I thought that the script definitely had Director Lee Chang-dong’s scent on it,” star Zo In-sung told me at TheWrap’s TIFF studio via an interpreter. “It was intriguing. It was gripping. It was very intense.”
“It always feels like when you read the screenplay (from Lee), you have read a wonderful novel,” Sul added, speaking via an interpreter. “It feels like a great piece of literature.”
As the actors, along with co-stars Jeon Do-yeon and Cho Yeo-jeong, sat with me in Toronto, their director was an ocean away, that very same day accepting the Silver Lion — Grand Jury Prize for “Possible Love” at the 83rd Venice Film Festival. The film went on to score first runner up for the International People’s Choice Award at TIFF, coming in behind Simon Stone’s “Elsinore.” Lee wrote the film alongside Jungmi Oh.
Jeon’s Mi-ok lies at the center of “Possible Love,” a woman who finds her marriage in new territory as her husband suffers under the weight of his trauma. The character, played beautifully by Jeon, yearns for connection and fears a greater loss. It’s a nuanced role, one Jeon strove to never oversell.
“I didn’t try to express anything deliberately, but I just wanted to be and also accept what was happening to her,” Jeon told TheWrap via an interpreter. “However, the one emotion that I wanted to carry all throughout, from the beginning until the very end, was this sense of anxiety, something that hovers over her because she doesn’t know when her husband is going to completely explode, and so she’s always carrying that sense of anxiety.”
Situated opposite Mi-ok is Ye-ji, a wealthy documentarian played by Jeon who seeks to capture the story of union strikes and crackdowns in Korean labor. In this role, Cho had to play a character who wants to be both neutral observer and close confidante to her subjects, with much of the film’s interpersonal tension spinning out of this dichotomy.
“It’s not that she’s intervening, she tries really not to, but more so than that, she truly believes that you need to be in love with these people, that you need to have genuine affection for them in order for her to tell the story,” Cho told TheWrap via an interpreter. “That’s why she wants to be friends with Mi-ok, and so I think while it was very brief, just having that sort of secondhand experience as a director and as a filmmaker, it is something. There is something about the character that’s very hard to put into words.”
And then there’s Ho-seok, the clear subject of Ye-ji’s documentary who can’t bear to find himself on camera. The film is in some ways characterized by his absence — at least, his emotional absence. Sul keeps his character’s feelings and turmoil buried deep inside, delivering a brilliantly contained performance for much of rate runtime.
“If you want to cry,” he tells Mi-ok in the trailer, “just cry,” for Ho-seok feels he cannot. Once that door cracks open, it remains forever unshut.
“He carries a great sense of hurt and pain inside, and he’s someone who harbors it without expressing it, and so what was given to me as tools of portrayal of the character were silences and certain glances, and I wanted him to appear as a character who’s very conflicted in thinking that he wants to express his feelings,” Sul said. “At the same time, he knows that once he does, it’s going to completely expose and reveal all of his vulnerabilities and his pride as well, and so I wanted him to be a character who you don’t meet immediately, however, somebody who slowly almost permeates the story.”
The actors all spoke of “Possible Love’s” screenplay and filmmaker with great reverence. When asked what they want audiences to take away from this film that eludes simple description, Zo pointed to the story’s complex humanity.
“I hope that after the audiences see the film, we can all look up at the moon and think about how we have been living our lives in this very complex social structure,” Zo said. “How am I living my life?
