Lee Chang-dong’s delicate yet sturdy drama Possible Love—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival, hitting theaters Oct. 23 and streaming on Netflix Nov. 6—is a movie about figuring out how to function in the world. If that description seems confoundingly vague, Lee’s movie is not. It shows us a world where people feel lost after losing their livelihood, where individuals strive to connect with others despite differences of class and temperament, where tenderness ultimately has more power than arrogance.
It’s a movie with a gentle, generous spirit. Lee opens the picture with a funeral, or, rather, a small family piling into their car to get to the funeral venue. Wife and mother Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) wonders if she’s wearing the right dress, and the shoes she has chosen, a pair she hasn’t worn in a long time, are already pinching her feet.
Her husband, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), says little—so little that it’s clear he’s filled with dread over whatever awaits him at this upcoming, obviously unhappy social event. Their extremely quiet young son (Jung Seop) sits in the back seat, amusing himself by dangling an empty chip bag out the window like a windsock. It’s never expressly spelled out who this funeral is for, but we can intuit that it’s one of Ho-seok’s former work colleagues.
It turns out that Ho-seok is one of many workers who not so long ago lost his job at a large corporation, SP, and he hasn’t yet recovered, either financially or emotionally. Mi-ok is doing the best she can—she holds down a menial factory job—but her husband’s depression and excessive drinking is getting to her. By chance, in the funeral home parking lot, she meets a handsome stranger, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), who moves his very expensive car when Mi-ok believes her wedding ring, having slipped off her finger, has rolled beneath it.
It turns out that Sang-woo’s wife, Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-Jong), is making a documentary about, as she puts it, “the personal lives of laborers.” Ye-ji is thrilled to have found Mi-ok and Ho-seok as subjects—she’s particularly interested in the melancholic Ho-seok, who, she believes, could be the dramatic key her project. But she and Mi-ok also genuinely like each other and strike up a friendship. Possible Love traces the tangled dynamics between these four characters, while also flirting with uncomfortable questions about the moral quandaries that can arise in any filmmaker-subject relationship.
Mostly, though, Possible Love traces the ways people come to care for one another, either platonically or romantically. Ye-ji and Mi-ok quickly come to think of themselves as sisters. Though Ye-ji has married well, she doesn’t come from a privileged family—her father ran a dry-cleaning establishment—and she has some sense of Mi-ok’s money worries and feelings of insecurity.
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