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Korean Master Lee Chang-dong’s 'Possible Love' Premieres at Venice Film Festival
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In Short: Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong's latest film 'Possible Love' makes its debut at the Venice Film Festival, exploring themes of love, class divides, and economic anxiety.
Possible Love, the first film from Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong since Burning (2018), is debuting today at the Venice Film Festival.
Time calls the film 'a delicate drama of love and longing in anxious times,' while IndieWire describes it as a 'sprawling drama about two very different couples who are brought together by the violent suppression of a workers' strike at a major Korean metals factory.
Lee Chang-dong’s patient hands transform Possible Love into 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.
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- 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.
- So for me personally and selfishly, I would very much love to see him in AEW.
- “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?
- Lee Chang-dong’s latest film, Possible Love, does indeed deal with love and the desire for the things we do not have but think we want.
- On the other side of the economic divide, the plucky but sad-eyed Mi-ok (played by “Secret Sunshine” actress Jeon Do-yeon, who delivers another once-a-century performance less than 20 years since her first collaboration with Lee) is clearly willing to do whatever it takes to bring her husband back to life.
- 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.