'Possible Love' asks if love can survive without understanding
Sul Kyung-gu, left, and Jeon Do-yeon / Captured from Netfllix
How much understanding does love require? Must two people fully understand each other, look in the same direction and inhabit similar worlds for their relationship to endure? Or can remaining beside someone, even with parts of them that may never make sense, also be called love?
Those questions linger long after watching director Lee Chang-dong's new film "Possible Love."
The film begins with an encounter between two married couples from sharply different worlds. Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, is a laid-off worker living with his wife Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon. Ye-ji, played by Cho Yeo-jeong, is a documentary filmmaker who wants to capture their lives on camera, while Zo In-sung plays her husband Sang-woo.
As the couples grow closer, their desires and emotional voids gradually come to the surface.
The film opens with an ominous commandment that reverberates throughout the film: "You shall not covet your neighbor's possessions."
Modern life constantly invites people to look at what others have: a better home, more money, greater stability or perhaps a more desirable spouse. Few are entirely unfamiliar with the experience of looking into someone else's life and suddenly taking stock of what is missing from their own.
The four characters in "Possible Love" similarly discover in one another something absent from their own lives. Those who have more become curious about those who have less, while those without privilege peer into the world of those who possess it.
One person may pick up a camera out of a genuine desire to understand someone else's pain. Yet at some point, that act of understanding can become an act of appropriating another person's life.
"Possible Love" refuses to pass easy judgment on its characters. Wealth does not make someone evil, just as poverty does not make someone virtuous. Desire can seep into even a sincere wish to help another person.
Relationships believed to be founded on love can simultaneously harbor jealousy, inferiority, anger and boredom. The characters' feelings are too complicated to explain solely as goodwill, yet too sincere to dismiss merely as desire.
At the center of this emotional complexity is Mi-ok.
Her husband Ho-seok lives with deep wounds and anger after losing his job. Their life is difficult and their future uncertain. Yet Mi-ok possesses a striking vitality.
She is not optimistic because she is naive about reality. She knows precisely where she stands, yet does not exaggerate her unhappiness or diminish herself when confronted with someone else's more privileged life.
Jeon Do-yeon / Captured from Netflix
Jeon portrays Mi-ok with remarkable naturalness. She does not overtly display sorrow, yet sadness is always present. She makes no effort to appear strong, yet strength emerges nonetheless. Rather than explaining Mi-ok's emotions, Jeon seems simply to inhabit her.
Before long, the viewer stops watching an actor perform and begins watching a person live.
That makes the reunion of Lee and Jeon particularly resonant. "Possible Love" brings them back together nearly two decades after "Secret Sunshine," Lee's acclaimed 2007 drama that won Jeon the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
If Shin-ae, Jeon's character in "Secret Sunshine," confronted God with questions after an unbearable loss, Mi-ok appears to be searching for somewhere to stand within the life she has been given.
She watches her broken husband, glances toward a seemingly better world and sometimes wavers, yet continues living her own life. What keeps this from feeling like mere resignation is the vitality Jeon preserves within the character.
Sul's Ho-seok is equally difficult to reduce to a simple label such as "laid-off worker."
His job loss took more than his paycheck. It also destabilized the social position through which he understood himself and damaged his sense of dignity. Sul seems to inscribe Ho-seok's accumulated shame, anger and helplessness onto his body.
Viewers may not be able to accept all of Ho-seok's anger, but it is difficult to ignore the conditions from which it grew.
Cho and Zo likewise give persuasive performances as characters who resist simple divisions between good and evil.
Ye-ji's attempt to film Ho-seok and Mi-ok's lives is particularly significant because it begins to feel like a question the film is asking of itself.
At what point does observing another person's suffering cease to be understanding and become consumption? How close can a filmmaker who turns someone's wounds into cinema truly get to that person's life? Can the distance between the person holding the camera and the person standing before it ever disappear?
Those questions appear directed not only at Ye-ji, but also at Lee himself.
In this way, "Possible Love" moves through labor, layoffs and class before turning its gaze toward the act of filmmaking itself. Eventually, all those questions converge on love.
Somewhere between the desire to understand another person's life and the desire to possess it, how do we love someone?
The title "Possible Love" sounds modest, perhaps even slightly resigned. But after watching the film, the word "possible" begins to carry surprising weight.
Perfect love is easy enough to imagine: two people who understand each other, never betray each other and remain of one heart until the end.
Real love contains all the moments that fantasy leaves out. There are words and actions we cannot understand, embarrassing jealousy and confusion, and feelings that cannot be explained even to those closest to us.
Remaining beside someone despite knowing all of that is difficult. Love itself does not automatically resolve those difficulties.
Perhaps that is why Mi-ok remains in the mind long after the film ends. It is not because her life provides an answer, but because she continues living even as she wavers.
Another day arrives despite emotions that cannot be understood and problems that remain unresolved. And within that life, one's feelings toward another person can begin moving again.
Leaving the theater brings us back to the question with which the film began: Can we love someone while accepting that parts of them may remain forever beyond our understanding?
There is still no easy answer. But even as we wait for perfect understanding that may never come, it remains possible to stay by someone's side.
In that sense, "Possible Love" ultimately leaves us with another question: not whether love can be perfect, but how we choose to remain beside the people we love.
This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, was translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.