possible love
Possible Love (2026)
Directed by Lee Chang-dong
My father is a quiet man. I haven’t talked to him in years. And beyond a brief period from 2020 through 2023, I have not spoken to him in eight years before that. Even as a child, we rarely had conversations. He told me he loved me once. He told me he was proud of me once. That was when I got straight A’s in the sixth grade. I’ve always placed a great deal of importance on academics, even though I never considered myself to be particularly smart. I think of him raising me at 38, me as a toddler. The question has changed from “how did he manage?” to “how could someone so unprepared do something so life-changing?” I think of what he must have endured, of immigrating from Mexico to the United States, and going through the rigmarole of learning a new language, dating my mother, marrying her, and having two children, all while having absolutely no connection to his past, no help from his family, and no discernible support system to speak of. A nomad? Was it by choice? Or by circumstance?
Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love details the uneasy friction between classes, in which an impoverished family becomes the subject of a documentary. A chance encounter at a funeral finds filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) following Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), her husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and son Cheol (Jung Seop). Ho-seok, in particular, is of interest to Ye-ji, as he was recently laid off from SP Industries, a Korean manufacturer that has been the subject of serious labor disputes. The company’s “reorganization” stems from its intention of selling to an American hedge fund, and Ho-seok was a union leader whose time with the company came to a tumultuous end. He’s a stoic figure, silent and prone to staring spells, wherein he loses himself in absent thought. In these moments, he reminds me of my father. When Ye-ji discusses her ambitions with her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), an entrepreneur and the product of generational wealth, she comments on the sadness in Ho-seok's eyes. The question that emerges from this is whether or not that sadness is out of compassion, or merely a means of extracting emotional content for her documentary.
Ho-seok’s quiet exterior makes getting an interview tough, so Ye-ji builds her friendship with Mi-ok. Ye-ji relies on language to disarm Mi-ok by insisting that they refer to each other in more casual terms, gently teasing each other as the two couples and Cheol go out for Korean BBQ. Mi-ok is immediately impressed by Sang-woo, citing a similarity to Steve Jobs, and often attempts to capture his attention through her measured glances. We quietly observe how Ho-seok struggles to connect with anyone, more content to pour soju than to contribute to the conversation at hand. He’s disconnected from the reality of the present; later, he makes the distinction that those still employed by SP Industries are among the living, those fired are the dead. It’s in these moments I identified most with Ho-seok, where the world’s slights have amassed in a tree-diagram of disappointment that the only refuge can seemingly be found at the bottom of a bottle of soju.
The film builds to a vacation, where the two couples meet at Sang-woo’s beach house. Ho-seok notes that he will finally go through the interview with Ye-ji, and Mi-ok’s one-sided connection with Sang-woo is taken to its limit. Meanwhile, Cheol connects with the groundskeeper on the beach house site, one of Sang-woo’s family friends that functions as a silent, mystical figure who bears witness to all of the beach house’s proceedings. It’s here where every detail of their past outlines the clear boundaries between classes; where Ye-ji’s intent can be reexamined as exploitation, and where the concept of freedom, within each character’s unique socioeconomic position, is exposed for all of its inherent hypocrisies. These moments were reminiscent of my upbringing, where my immediate family would visit my aunt and uncle in the suburbs. The language du jour would be Polish, leaving my father, brother, and me to watch television while the adults talked. We would put on professional wrestling, the refuge of the lower classes, and my uncle would storm in and shut the tv off, remarking on how we could watch something so barbaric. In his eyes, he was trying to hoist us out of lower-class thinking. In his eyes, my father was not there.
Every detail of Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love accumulates masterfully, where Ho-seok’s interview serves as a convulsive exorcism of his past. He lets it all out, if not for himself, then for Ye-ji’s content. Similarly, Mi-ok crosses a threshold, where the weight of the past is washed away by the ocean water. My father, working for the same employer for nearly three decades, was unceremoniously fired just a few short years before being able to collect his pension. He lost it all, for no particularly noble reason. Ho-seok, meanwhile, fought for something. That’s where the division arises, and where I ask myself: am I fighting for anything? I find myself more embittered, confronted with loss and anomie, dissatisfaction with my present, the social circumstances of my time, and the loneliness of inhabiting a new space. I fear becoming like my father. I fear becoming like Ho-seok. But the days of me observing, as Cheol does, are long gone. I stare up at the moon, like you all, like my friends, like my enemies, and try to afford meaning into this life that was more than what my father has.