Possible Love

In such searing dramas as Secret Sunshine (NYFF45) and Burning (NYFF56), the great filmmaker Lee Chang-dong pierces the heart of contemporary South Korea, laying bare the scars of personal trauma and socioeconomic grievance. His extraordinary latest concerns two middle-aged couples from different walks of life who become unlikely acquaintances. Working-class Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), who have been together since middle school and are the parents of a taciturn 10-year-old, are still reckoning with the fallout from Ho-seok’s firing from his factory job after a violently suppressed labor union strike. The well-off Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) are a documentary filmmaker and her businessman husband; Ye-ji has decided to make a movie about job layoffs and wants to make Mi-ok and Ho-seok her main camera subjects. The result is a brilliantly unfolding narrative of simmering resentments, shifting allegiances, sexual tensions, and queries around nonfiction filmmaking ethics that keeps revealing new layers and meanings, anchored by four towering performances that hit a varying array of fragile emotional registers. Possible Love speaks profoundly to our shared current moment of emotional and economic precarity. A Netflix release.