In 1989, Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski made Dekalog, the classic television series inspired by the Bible's Ten Commandments. Eight long years after his last masterpiece, Burning (2018), Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong makes a welcome return with Possible Love, his interpretation of the tenth commandment: Thou shalt not covet. He has set this commandment in the contemporary context of an uber-consumerist society and culture and ever-deepening class divides in which workers’ rights and labour movements become easy scapegoats.
The film had its world premiere in the competition section at Venice, where it won the FIPRESCI award. After doing the rounds in international film festivals like Toronto and New York, and a limited theatrical release, the Netflix production is now available on the streaming platform.
Possible Love is a great successor and perfect companion piece to Bong Joon-ho's Parasite and Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice. It also unspools like Chang-dong’s singular, albeit tangential, take on meta cinema. Lee Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an affluent documentary filmmaker, wants to film the life of laid-off worker Choi Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife Ahn Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon). She also imagines their story as the stuff of a possible fiction feature; she is passionate about making it someday. A case of a self-referential film within the film.
It also becomes an inquiry into the act of filming reality. Despite an avowed empathy, how much can a filmmaker intrude, probe into, and appropriate the lives of others? Where does the line need to be drawn? Can filmmaking then be an act of self-indulgence, greed and covetousness? And, thereby, another allusion to the tenth of the Biblical principles and ethics?
Chang-dong creates an elegant narrative of turmoil, a sophisticated telling of lives in utter disarray. In terms of the reality it portrays, there are moments and elements in Possible Love that feel like mirroring the agrarian crisis, farmers’ suicides and protests in India. The self-censure and regret of the spouse and the family when a worker/farmer resorts to suicide, the fear it evokes in other families about what may come to pass for them, quite like in the 2009 Marathi film, Gabhricha Paus (The Damned Rain), and the heartbreaking scenes of workers’ therapy sessions take one back to Kinshuk Surjan’s documentary on the community of widows of farmers in Maharashtra, Marching in the Dark.
Co-written by Chang-dong with Oh Jung-mi, the film is propelled by conversations, at times making us see previously unexplained events in a new light. Jung Jae-il’s music punctuates the chatter quietly, discreetly.
Kim Ji-yong’s camera is intimate and impeccable in framing both the humans and the filmmaker’s camera that is trained on them. In contrast, there's raw, archival news footage-like feel in the way he captures the violent police crackdown on the workers.
Objects become metaphors. The full moon is an equaliser stretching over the rich as well as the poor. But can it truly bridge the divides and inequities? A loose and lost wedding ring becomes a sign of a rocky marriage. A whistle sounds out the entrenched societal power play even as it switches hands from the haves to the have-nots. The sea signifies freedom, or rather the illusion of it. The filmmaker, as well as the surveillance camera, dredges out what the humans tend to hide.
Yet there are times when the film can be read and imbibed from its actors’ faces alone. The essential inscrutability of Kyung-gu as Ho-seok powerfully leads on to the turbulent panic attack that makes him let out the bottled-up inner rage not just at the heartlessness of the management but at the betrayal of his fellow workers. His bitterness, cynicism, and animus against the idea of unity and solidarity of the disempowered are the most distressing aspects of the film.
The poker-faced, observational eyes of young Choi Cheol (Jeong Seop), the son of Ho-seok and Mi-ok, seem to see and understand things better than the adults around him. The most effective is Do-yeon, who leads from the front as Mi-ok, bringing flirtatiousness, sexual tension, aspiration, fragility, and resilience all together in her persona. Envy, resentment, and desire couldn’t have been better personified.