Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong brings to Venice his first feature for eight years. It is a finely judged, beautifully acted and rather novelistic work, in which a character at one point actually compares her surroundings to something from a novel. It is expansive and diffuse in terms of storytelling scope and dramatic focus, rich in intelligence while paying its audience the compliment of treating them as intelligent also. There are moments of pure inspiration in the superb flashback scenes of two characters’ early lives, and I rather regretted that these flashbacks were phased out relatively early on and that more was not made of their relationship with the present. Possible Love is perhaps a little contrived and self-aware and unsure how much emphasis to lay on its moments of irony and comedy, but it is made with such fluency and verve.
It is a tale of two couples. Jeon Do-yeon (from Lee’s Secret Sunshine) and Sul Kyung-gu play Mi-ok and Ho-seok, a deeply unhappy married couple from a blue-collar background with a young son. Ho-seok is angry, depressed and struggling with a drinking problem after a catastrophic end to a strike at the factory where he worked. While at the funeral of a colleague of Ho-seok’s, who has taken his own life, he and Mi-ok meet a fashionable and wealthy couple who are making a documentary about the injustice of the way the factory workers were treated. (This couple have a dog instead of a child.)
