Lee Chang-dong’s ‘Possible Love’: Looking at resistance
Drawing on the 2009 Ssangyong Motor strike, Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love” questions class conflict, labour and the ethical limits of looking at other people’s suffering. Focusing on Choi Ho-seok, who has lost his job, and his wife Ahn Mi-ok, the film blends its own gaze with that of Lee Ye-ji, who wants to film the couple. Some things are hidden because the camera is there, while others come to light because of it.
Possible Love, Lee Chang-dong’s new film, which came back from Venice with the Grand Jury Prize, looks, in the director’s own words, at the pain of others; it questions that act of looking and draws the audience into its whirl along with its characters. The film is inspired by the strike that began in 2009 after Ssangyong Motor decided to lay off 37% of its workforce. The strike, put down by riot police with heavy violence, left the workers with serious traumatic effects. The director talks about how the workers lost most of their social and economic rights after these events, and about the class transformation South Korea has gone through.
This transformation, which we have also seen in popular productions such as Parasite, No Other Choice and Squid Game, takes on a form in Lee’s hands that is at once deeply painful and real, and full of hope and poetry.
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