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Critics Praise Lee Chang-dong’s 'Possible Love' at Venice Film Festival
Confirmed
In Short: Lee Chang-dong's 'Possible Love' is receiving critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, with reviewers praising its nuanced exploration of love and class divides.
Possible Love, the first film from Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong since Burning (2018), is debuting today at the Venice Film Festival.
Lee Chang-dong’s latest film, Possible Love, deals with love and desire, but also union and community, empathy, and perseverance, according to the International Cinephile Society.
What's confirmed
- 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.” Time calls the film “a delicate drama of love and longing in anxious times”: “Lee Chang-dong’s delicate yet sturdy drama Possible Love is a movie about figuring out how to function in the world.
- “An absolute knockout of a film about love having the possibility to bridge divides and deliver freedom, even for a brief moment.” In 2009 factory workers at Korea’s SsangYong Motor launched a historic 77-day strike against mass layoffs that resulted from a corporate restructuring plan.
- What does all of this have to do with love, or even possible love?
- In Lee Chang-dong’s patient hands, Possible Love becomes a film not just about love and desire, but about union and community, about empathy for and solidarity with those that matter to us, about perseverance and class divides, and ultimately about the bond between two people bound by love.
What's still developing
- So for me personally and selfishly, I would very much love to see him in AEW.
- But it would be unwisely reductive to conclude that the working-class woman is jealous of her hyper-affluent new bestie, just as it would be unhelpfully rash to assume that envy plays a more pivotal role in this story than resentment, or that a film as mottled and probing as “Possible Love” might be content to retrench the divide between Korea’s haves and have-nots.
- It is possible that the love between Mi-ok and Ho-seok will rekindle; it is possible that the “love” that Ye-ji shrilly insists she is trying to feel for them will be real.
- 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.
- She also gets drunk with Mi-ok – all part of what Sang-woo calls her “method acting” approach to befriending interviewees, to which she indignantly replies: “I’m trying to love these people.” Ye-ji intrusively pokes her camera into every corner of the couple’s lives.
- Possible Love The Bottom Line Another stunner from one of the greats of contemporary world cinema.
- 23 Cast : Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung, Cho Yeo-jeong, Jung Seop Director : Lee Chang-dong Screenwriters : Lee Chang-dong, Oh Jung-mi Rated R, 2 hours 44 minutes Following its premiere run at the Venice, Toronto and New York film festivals, Possible Love — recently chosen as Korea ’s submission in the international Oscar category — will open Oct.
- Speaking with Deadline ahead of his trip to Venice, director Lee said the film’s story was inspired by a Korean conglomerate that went through mass layoffs some years ago.