We review the film ‘A Possible Love’, now available on Netflix
Some time ago, a good friend told me that, when he saw the film at the time of its release, “Neighborhood” (1998), by Fernando León de Aranoa, he had liked it very much; However, when he reviewed it years later, he found it unbearable. The reason was that it now seemed to him that the director’s undoubtedly well-intentioned gaze on the inhabitants of a suburb resembled that of a visitor to a zoo. Look at all those poor people caged by their circumstances, he tells us. Don’t you feel sorry for them? It’s an anecdote that came to mind while I was watching “A possible love”one of the best films that 2026 will leave us with.
The last time we were lucky enough to enjoy a film by one of the greatest living filmmakers on the planet, the South Korean Lee Chang-Dong (54), was with “Burning” (17), a fascinating study of the various crises that threaten the youth of the 21st century in the style of a mystery thriller, inspired by a short story by Haruki Murakami. Almost a decade has passed since then and now, thanks to Netflix, a no less masterful work arrives. In this case, we could define it as a “social drama”, but, as always happens with this author, there is something more, because his characters have so many nuances that it is impossible to reduce them to generic topics.
Apparently, the inspiration for this work was twofold. On the one hand, it emerged from a collective project of several filmmakers from around the world to pay tribute to the famous “Decalogue”, the series of television films that a legendary filmmaker, the Polish Krzysztof Kieslowski, shot in the late 1980s, inspired by the ten biblical commandments. Lee Chang-Dong He chose the tenth: “Thou shalt not covet other people’s goods.” As already happened in “Burning”, It shows us how social differences affect human relationships, but if in the former it was done through the clash between youthful dreams and a merciless reality, here it is revealed through the meeting of two adult couples for whom the past constitutes a much heavier burden.
The other source of inspiration was a real event. In 2009, hundreds of workers at one of South Korea’s largest automobile factories, Ssangyong Motor Company, camped out at the company’s facilities to protest mass layoffs resulting from a corporate restructuring. After seventy-seven days of occupation, the police brutally evicted the strikers, leaving dozens injured and detained. Lee Chang-Dong He thought about making a film that would tell that story, but when he tried to capture the events in a script, he realized that he couldn’t do it and, even more, that he felt like a fake. To what extent was he becoming a voyeur of other people’s misfortune? Wasn’t there something pornographic about bringing the suffering of your country’s workers to the screen for the consumption of the sophisticated public at the major international film festivals? (In fact, “A possible love” would end up receiving the Grand Jury Prize in Venice).
This is a doubt that never seems to cross the mind of Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an elegant upper-class woman who wants to film a documentary about the situation of laid-off workers from a large company. When he goes with his camera to the headquarters of his old union, he meets a couple that catches his attention, formed by the spirited Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and her taciturn husband, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu). Her own husband, the rich and handsome Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), encourages her to fulfill her dream of becoming a film director, but deep down, she perceives that her affinity with working-class struggles is somewhat imposture. As he points out in one of the film’s many great dialogues, “She’s like a method actress,” someone who is just playing a role, who has borrowed a fictitious identity.
While Ho-seok seems impenetrable, a man incapable of communicating, although from the first moment we sense that something is not right inside him, Mi-ok is delighted to collaborate on the documentary and a kind of friendship is established between the two women. Although the entire cast is at a very high level, Jeon Do-yeon, whom we already met thanks to one of the great films of Lee Chang-Dong, “Secret Sunshine” (07), takes over “A possible love” with a character of enormous humanity. Who at first seems like a simple and confident woman becomes, throughout the film, a three-dimensional, wonderfully complex and magnetic person.
As always happens in the cinema Lee Chang-Dongthe film, which is close to three hours long, advances slowly, but inexorably. There is, it seems, not a line of dialogue or a shot wasted, until we reach the last act, which takes up approximately the final hour. The two couples spend a weekend in a luxurious seaside home owned by Sang-woo’s family. There, after confronting each other and themselves, the truth about these four characters will be revealed to us. And it does so in an unexpected way, but at the same time, consistent with everything we have discovered about them. A closing, in short, with the touch of a master.
