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One of the key moments from Lee Chang-dong’s last film, 2018’s “Burning,” still glows bright in the memory. A girl mimes eating a tangerine, and explains the knack for making it convincing: don’t try to pretend there
is a tangerine, try to forget there is not. It’s a little zen koan that rhymes imperfectly in “Possible Love,” Lee’s wonderfully rich and deep new movie, when Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon, delivering one of the most intricate performances of the year) is entranced by the fancy house by the sea to which she has been invited. “It’s like a place from a novel!” she exclaims, only for her husband to scoff gently at the idea that Mi-ok reads novels at all. “Ok then,” she says agreeably, refusing to be any less enthused, “It’s like a place from a novel I haven’t read.”
Absences so clearly delineated they read as presences; dreams so unattainable the yearning for them takes on mass and dimension, maybe even brick-and-mortar form. “Possible Love” is not a mystery, but it is rife with such little mysteries. And yet Lee’s elegantly unshowy filmmaking, typified by DP Kim Ji-yong’s coolly discreet photography, and the inner life that Jeon suggests is being lived behind Mi-ok’s bright, disingenuous eyes, are grounded in the prosaic reality, trenchantly observed, of Korean classism and labor exploitation. It is perhaps only Lee Chang-dong who can so seamlessly integrate such radically separate themes and moods, with every event being of consequence but nothing feeling forced. “Possible Love,” ostensibly a relationship drama tracking two marriages from opposite sides of the social divide, unfolds with surprise and inevitability held in such perfect balance that each moment feels like it’s telling you something you’ve always known, but have just never thought of before.
Mi-ok is married to Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu, from Lee’s “Peppermint Candy” and “Oasis”) a heavy-industry worker who has recently been fired following an unsuccessful strike at the factory that is the area’s biggest employer. Their son Cheol (Jung Seop) seems to have inherited his father’s taciturn disposition. He’s a quiet, watchful boy with the habit of hiding in closets or lurking near doorways the better to hear how adults talk when they think no kids are around. But perhaps his father is not naturally so surly; later will come a moment when Ho-seok’s dam breaks and we realize, with a stab of profoundest sympathy, just what a vast reservoir of hurt it has been holding in check.
There has been a rash of suicides following the factory-wide layoffs. At a funeral for one fallen friend Ho-seok, feeling shunned by his erstwhile strike comrades, gets into a soju-fuelled altercation. It’s defused by Mi-ok, but they’ve caught the eye of Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong, of “Parasite” fame), a pretty, well-heeled aspiring filmmaker shooting footage for a high-minded documentary about the human cost of corporate downsizing. Ho-seok declines to participate, but Mi-ok becomes Ye-ji’s interview subject, and then, after a fashion, her friend. There is perhaps a subtle critique here, of the predatory instincts of the filmmaker towards their subject, of the desire to invade someone else’s life and shape their reality according to your own will. These are instincts that Lee has somehow been born without; his subjects may be fictional creations but, especially as embodied by such a fine cast, they’re allowed to live and breathe their own private existences, their own personal idiosyncrasies, yielding characters who are almost as unknowably strange as, in your secret heart, you know yourself to be.
Their unequal friendship does however bring Mi-ok into the social orbit of Ye-ji’s moneyed, attractive husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). She is a little awed by him at first, made almost shy in his presence — he’s the kind of enigma who is solid only when viewed in your peripheral vision, as though his surface dazzle makes him hard look at directly. For his part, Sang-woo is supportive, in a casual and vaguely patronizing way, of his wife’s filmmaking ambitions, and politely tolerates these less fortunates, until his offhand attention is piqued by Mi-ok’s tipsily flirtatious fascination with him. At dinners together, and then at the wealthy couple’s fabulous seaside property, complete with winding forest path, private beach and a guard hut manned by Min-sik (Kang Chang-gwon), Sang-woo’s childhood playmate-turned-deferential factotum, uneasy alliances, easily ruptured, interconnect the foursome. Little Cheol looks on, unnoticed, from the back of every room.
“Possible Love” carries the brief dedication “In memory of Dekalog 10 by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz,” and after Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales” is the second in a planned 10-film, multi-auteur project remaking Kiezlowski’s masterpiece. Lee’s film is wholly original, and has no relation to the storyline of “Dekalog 10,” which is inspired by the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet.” And yet his movie is mischievously multi-layered enough that the idea of covetousness does open up heady new seams of interpretation. For one thing covetousness, as opposed to the more concrete sins like theft or murder or adultery, is a thought crime, and almost all that goes on here, happens within the minds of the characters (again, what kind of wizard can make such interiorized action so endlessly compelling?)
For another, you only covet what you do not have, but you have to be aware you do not have it. Mi-ok is houseproud about her small family home, and the never-used marble picnic table that Ho-seok, in happier times, built with the idea it would be a gathering point for chatty groups of friends to share a drink. But returning home after some time with Ye-ji and Sang-woo, their place suddenly looks shabby and cheap. Another time, Mi-ok remembers a childhood incident when her mother, who washed cars for a living, slapped the hose out of her hands when she caught Mi-ok imitating her. The adult Mi-ok understands that her mother was scared by the idea that her daughter might have the same life she did. But when we teach our children to dream big, and to want bigger lives than we had, are we helping them or, given the array of social forces that will in all likelihood deny them any mobility, are we simply setting them up for a discontented adulthood? When Mi-ok sees Cheol bonding with the groundskeeper and hosing the villa’s manicured garden, she turns away and lets him continue to water the plants.
As written in the Bible, the Tenth Commandment is a stern prohibition. In “Dekalog 10”, it became a drolly comic cautionary tale. But in “Possible Love” it could almost be a statement of reward. Behave without hypocrisy and without cruelty and you open yourself up to betrayal and exploitation, but you may also earn the gift of not-coveting, of understanding you have no need to envy or aspire to the trappings of someone else’s life.
Mi-ok and Ho-seok share a calm, lovely moment on their brand new marble bench. They have found that there can be some comfort in being on the righteous side of a struggle even, perhaps especially, if it is lost. There can be comfort in discovering that the pages of the book never read were blank all along. There can be comfort in knowing that what you have may be paltry, but it is better than cherishing the illusory outline of something you do not have at all. This shimmering, sonorous work, from one of our greatest living directors, moves through the peculiar landscapes of human interaction with certainty, eccentricity and grace to remind us that, no matter how good the pretence, there is no tangerine.
