Lee Chang-dong, Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu on Class, Desire and Reunion in Venice Competition Drama ‘Possible Love’

Every great love story, in Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong‘s telling, is secretly a story about love that cannot happen — class, status or fate standing in the way. His new film dares to ask the opposite question, and it took him the better part of two decades, one abandoned script about a 2009 workers’ strike and a single idea from his co-writer to find an answer worth filming. A funeral draws the couple into contact with Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a filmmaker shooting a documentary about laid-off workers, and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung); they are a couple whose money and detachment set them apart from Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s daily struggle.

Once Mi-ok signs on to be filmed, a bond forms with Ye-ji, while something harder to name pulls her toward the unreadable Sang-woo, and the two households’ collision starts to crack open both marriages. Zo and Cho are working with Lee for the first time. The mass layoff at the center of the film happened at a major Korean company in 2009, followed by a 70-day strike and a violent crackdown by authorities.

Lee began developing a fictional treatment soon after but could not finish it. The story only came back to life once his co-writer, Oh Jung-mi, suggested pairing it with the story of a filmmaker. That doubling lets him ask a question he says has followed him since his years as a novelist, long before he started directing.

This is something that always I had in mind,” he says, adding that the question belongs to all filmmaking, not only documentaries, and that he wanted “Possible Love” to put it to the audience as much as to himself. He locates the film’s title in the same territory. On the distance between the two couples, he resists calling it simple class conflict: “Now we live at a time where class is really no longer just class,” he says, pointing to Sang-woo as someone who “deals with the amount of wealth and capital that is unfathomable by people like Mi-ok and Ho-seok.” Lee also traces the story to the 10th commandment, “thou shalt not covet,” and to Kieślowski’s “Dekalog 10.” “The former nine [commandments] all are about human actions.

However, this very last one is about the human heart,” he says, framing the film’s real question as how much resistance to coveting is even possible “in this capitalist society we live today,” and noting that Ye-ji’s desire to claim other people’s lives for her documentary is its own version of the same impulse. Jeon, reuniting with Lee nearly 20 years after “Secret Sunshine,” found her way into Mi-ok through what they share rather than their circumstances. She also connected with Mi-ok’s refusal to collapse under hardship, echoing something she says has been said about her own work as an actor.

Where “Secret Sunshine” had been “very intense,” she says this time “I felt so comfortable and so much at ease when I stepped onto the set.” She adds that “Possible Love” arrives at a point in her career when she has grown frustrated watching commercial appeal crowd out character work in the Korean industry, and that the project is “so significant for me at this juncture.” Sul, reuniting with Lee 24 years after “Oasis,” which won Lee the Venice Film Festival‘s best director prize in 2002, agreed to the project before reading a script. Getting back on set stirred the same nerves he felt making that film decades earlier. Playing Ho-seok’s silence, he says, was the harder task.