Cinema of Wayward Souls
Lee Chang-dong was on set in Gunsan, in the far southwest of South Korea, making “Possible Love,” his first feature in eight years. He was dressed like a director, in blacks and blues—jeans, baseball cap, puffer coat, Hokas—but spoke and moved at the unhurried pace of a novelist, his original vocation. He is seventy-two years old, with longish black hair and a spindly frame. A child actor on one of his previous films has said that Lee reminded him of Severus Snape, the surly Hogwarts professor from “Harry Potter.”
It was late October, cool and overcast. Rows of green tents covered in banners—“Firings are murder!” “Let my dad get back to work!”—lined the main road of an enormous, half-deserted manufacturing plant. Men wearing jackets that read “SP Heavy Industries”—the name of a fictional factory in the midst of a labor dispute—stood in huddles, gabbing and smoking cigarettes. Others arrived carrying boxed provisions for fellow-protesters: bottled water and Buldak cup ramen. The women playing their wives inventoried the encampment and supervised a flock of children on scooters and bikes. Someone strummed a guitar.
“Possible Love” is based on a real confrontation, from 2009, when SsangYong Motor, a Korean carmaker, announced that it was laying off a third of its workforce—some twenty-six hundred people—at a factory in Pyeongtaek, just south of Seoul. In the wake of the Great Recession, the company argued that the layoffs were necessary to save its business. Lee saw it differently. In his view, SsangYong became the first Korean corporation to “normalize restructuring for the sole purpose of increasing profits.” Workers and their families staged a sitdown strike while the Korean Metal Workers’ Union contested the layoffs in court. SsangYong called in strikebreakers, but the workers fought them off and barricaded themselves on the roof of the factory. “If you aren’t willing to talk, you might as well kill us!” they wrote in spray paint. Swarms of police officers descended from helicopters and beat them with billy clubs and metal shields. (A similar scene, interwoven with footage of the actual event, plays out in the film.) Many workers involved subsequently died by suicide. “I’m sorry you had to suffer because of your incompetent husband,” one man wrote to his wife. “Even at the end, all I can give you is debt.” Litigation and demonstrations dragged on for a decade. SsangYong was eventually sold to an Indian company; SP is acquired by Americans.
An early scene in “Possible Love” takes place at the funeral for a worker who has killed himself. His wife “was changing the baby’s diaper, and he said from the door, ‘I’m going,’ ” an acquaintance explains. “That was the last she saw of him.” Two years have passed since the layoffs, and the man’s colleagues refer even to surviving fired workers as “dead” and the still employed as “living.” Those involved have been in and out of the hospital; relationships have been severed. The core narrative, the ambiguous love story suggested by the film’s title, centers on the romantic and professional entanglements of two couples. There’s Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), a former SP welder who’s scarred by the aftermath of his firing, and his vibrant and restless wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon). They have a son, Cheol—literally “steel”—who’s ten. Then there’s Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a filmmaker intent on documenting the SP saga, and her wealthy husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).
At the simulated encampment, on the ghostly former grounds of General Motors Korea (more real-life restructuring), Lee walked around with his art director, inspecting props. Eventually, he found me in the bustle. “I’ll be in my tent, at the monitor,” he said, in Korean. I first contacted Lee in 2019, a year after the release of his previous feature, “Burning,” which starred Steven Yeun and won the critics’ award at the Cannes Film Festival. At the time, Korean culture—K-pop and K-dramas, K-beauty and K-lit—was seemingly everywhere. A splashy K-film with an upstairs-downstairs premise, “Parasite,” by the director Bong Joon-ho, a friend of Lee’s, was in theatres and on its way to winning Best Picture at the Oscars. (Cho plays the wife in the upstairs couple.) Since the nineteen-nineties, a Korean New Wave had been praised for embedding capitalist critique in movies packed with monsters, slithering octopuses, killers, and killer cops. (The directors were all men.) Lee’s work was less commercial, less fit to a genre. “Lee Chang-dong carried that political consciousness into his own work and infused it with a more literary approach,” Goran Topalovic, a curator of East Asian cinema, told me.
In the director’s tent, Lee sat next to his script supervisor, hunched over a boxy monitor that had long blinders attached to keep out the light. His vision was synchronized with that of his cinematographer, Kim Ji-yong. Sitting behind Lee, against the windblown wall of the tent, was the talent. Jeon was drawn into a ball with her eyes closed. Sul was staring at his phone. At their feet were treacherous-looking heaters fuelled by the kind of butane cannister you see at Korean barbecue restaurants. When I asked the head producer, Yoon Seo-young, why the stars didn’t have trailers, he said, “Actors in Korea don’t get trailers. There isn’t enough money or parking.”
The scene they were shooting depicts the early days of the strike: Ho-seok, Mi-ok, and Cheol walk through the front gate of the plant, toward the encampment, looking nervous but optimistic. They have rolling suitcases, backpacks, and a big blanket in a plastic zip case. “Cut,” Lee said through a walkie-talkie. “When they’re passing by those two men”—worker extras—“the men should bow to Ho-seok, but not too deeply.” Ho-seok enjoyed a level of familial seniority; he refers to his younger co-workers as dongsaeng, younger brother.
For the next scene, Kim switched from a big, shoulder-mounted camera to an iPhone. He held it horizontally, panning the busy tableau of the main tent—a folksy sing-along, banner-painting, cute kids. The idea was to mimic what an SP worker might have shot with his own smartphone. Lee ran the actors through multiple takes, but still felt dissatisfied. He walked over to Kim, who’s best known for his work with the director Park Chan-wook and on the hit Netflix series “Squid Game,” a gory satire of economic survival. (In the first season, we learn that the protagonist had also been laid off from, and traumatized by, a fictionalized version of SsangYong Motor.) “Something more like this,” Lee said, miming a frame with his hands. Kim smiled and shrugged, as if to say, Sure, give it a try. Lee took the iPhone and shot the scene himself.
Lee employs a fiercely vérité style: endogenous light and sound, lived-in muss. He tries to get his actors not to act, and uses nonactors, sometimes pulled from his crew, whenever he can. “I don’t find it meaningful to rehearse in an office,” he told me. “The actors have to be on set.” Only there can tingly frictions and glints of revelation emerge. Sean Baker, the Oscar-winning director of “Anora,” called Lee a master of “unsafe cinema.” Lee loves, and is often compared to, John Cassavetes and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Lee Isaac Chung, the director of “Minari” and “Twisters,” told me, “He’s one of those filmmakers who’s a genre unto himself.”
Lee was born in 1954, the fifth of six children, to an educated but impoverished family in the city of Daegu. The Korean War had ended the year before, and Daegu soon became a base of support for the pro-U.S. military government. Lee’s father, a leftist, opposed the new regime and isolated himself, refusing to take part in what he saw as a “vulgar capitalist society.” Lee describes a similar personage in one of his stories as a “failure in life,” and a suspicion of ideology pervades his work; he bristled when I asked if he, too,thought of himself as a leftist.
It was Lee’s mother who supported the family, by sewing traditional hanbok. “I remember having less and less money, and moving to smaller and smaller places,” Lee told me. One of his two older sisters, who has cerebral palsy, suffered a fresh round of taunts in each new neighborhood. So did Lee, who got into frequent fights. At one point, the entire family lived in a single room in the back of a relative’s house. Lee returned a few years ago, for a French documentary, and discovered that the room was now a bathroom. “I couldn’t believe all those bodies had fit into that space,” he said.
During elementary school, Lee showed no interest in studying. A cousin made him a deal. “He told me, ‘If you do your homework, I’ll bring you a book,’ ” Lee recalled. The books were Western classics abridged for kids: Jules Verne’s “Two Years’ Vacation”; “The Count of Monte Cristo,” by Alexandre Dumas. “That was, for me, a crucial moment,” Lee said. He immersed himself in adventure tales and started to write his own, mimicking their style. He also found himself on the set of a film. The director Kim Soo-yong, who made some of the best Korean features of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, shot one of his not-so-good movies, a melodrama titled “Sorrow Even Up in Heaven,” at Lee’s school, and cast Lee as an extra. He gets caught in a rainstorm with the main character, a destitute fourth grader.
Lee’s eldest brother, who, to their mother’s distress, had decided to pursue theatre, introduced Lee to Shakespeare and Ionesco. One day, when Lee was around twelve, his brother invited a few friends over—to the tiny room that’s now a bathroom—for a reading of “Misery and Nobility,” a farcical nineteenth-century play with a prince-and-the-pauper conceit, by Eduardo Scarpetta. Lee, enraptured, sensed that a transfiguration was happening. “We were so poor, but here was my brother putting on a play. To me, he and his friends looked like ‘Misery,’ like peasants, but they understood themselves to be doing something elevated. They were making art.”
At the time, making art was a fraught exercise. Lee came of age under the military dictator Park Chung-hee, who imposed a midnight curfew and strict censorship of everything from newspapers to pop songs. In high school, Lee joined a group called the Stairway Literature Club. The members designed a poster to advertise a public reading, and Lee had to take it to the local police station to get a literal stamp of approval. The officer asked whether the “stairway” was going up or down. Lee didn’t know what to say. The officer was even more suspicious of the poster’s color. “It was rejected,” Lee told me. “There was a lot of red.”
After finishing compulsory military service, Lee went to college to become a teacher of Korean literature. In May of 1980, the campus was suddenly locked down, and he played cards all night at a friend’s house. Only later did they learn why the gates had been closed: on the other side of the peninsula, Chun Doo-hwan, the President at the time, had sent armed troops to crush a democratic uprising in Gwangju, killing hundreds of civilians. Lee felt sick with guilt for his ignorance.
He got a job at a public high school and married an aspiring writer named Lee Jung-ran. In his spare time, he wrote stories and novellas that were darkly funny and often autofictional. In “The Leper,” a translation of which recently ran in this magazine, a man named Maksu—Marx, as in Karl—comes under suspicion by the police for having a father who claims to have been “a Communist active in the old South Korean Labor Party”; his mother shoulders the “family’s daily struggle for survival.” Images from Lee’s stories later appeared in his films: a young woman, trekking through the snow to visit her first love at a military base; a body on fire. “Even in his writing, he has cinematic vision,” Heinz Insu Fenkl, a professor at SUNY New Paltz and Lee’s primary English translator, told me.
In 1985, Lee’s firstborn, then a preschooler, died in a traffic accident. (Lee has two other children, now grown.) His personal agony fused with despair over the military government, which continued to crack down on democracy activists. “During that time, another parent I knew got in touch,” Lee recalled, in an interview with the Korean magazine Cine21. “ ‘I see we’ve boarded the same boat,’ he said. He’d lost a child, too. That’s how it was. We’d boarded a boat that was cursed.” Similarly, Lee said, “to heal from Gwangju, to understand it, was impossible. The only thing to do was to live with the wound.”
Lee later wrote the story “Fire and Dust,” in which a man tries to make sense of his marriage and the world around him after his young son is run over by a truck. “For the past year, we’d tried hard not to touch each other, even in bed. As if the slightest contact of skin would transmit each other’s pain,” the narrator says. “What was most unbearable for me was the fact that there was no meaning in his death.” When he sees on TV that a group of student activists have lit themselves on fire, he feels a familiar pain burble up: “Did they know the meaning of their death?”
In his late thirties, Lee was reconsidering his relationship to what Koreans call “pure literature.” He told me, “I started to doubt myself, and felt that I had to go down another path.” His friend, the filmmaker Park Kwang-su, hired him as a writer and an assistant director on “To the Starry Island” (1993), a fantastical drama about the intimate divides caused by the Korean War. Such topics were no longer off limits; South Korea was officially a democracy. During a shoot on a remote island, Lee and the rest of the crew had to lug heavy equipment off boats and across a mountain. “I thought, This is not the medium for me,” he said. But then, action. “There was a light rain. I trembled at the sound of the camera. It was as though the whole world fell silent.”
“To the Starry Island” had drawn a somewhat experimental investment from Samsung, the first state-supported conglomerate, or chaebol, to enter the movie business. It premièred the same year as the international hit “Jurassic Park.” Kim Young-sam, then South Korea’s President, famously observed that Steven Spielberg’s movie had generated more in profit than a million Hyundai cars. “His words were very symbolic,” Lee told me. “For cars, no matter how much you automate production, you still have to invest a lot. But with the ‘contents’ business, because it’s a business of reproduction, there’s an endless value added without increased production costs.” In 1995, the chaebol CJ Group invested some three hundred million dollars in Spielberg’s DreamWorks.
Lee’s tastes, though, were more art house than blockbuster. He continued working with Park Kwang-su, and won Korea’s top screenwriting prize for “A Single Spark (1995),” a bio-pic about Jeon Tae-il, a young garment worker whose self-immolation, in protest of sweatshop conditions, “opened the door for the labor movement,” Lee told me. It was while polishing this script that Lee reached a crossroads in his career. One morning, his bulky home computer wouldn’t boot up. The Michelangelo virus, which proliferated in the nineties and was programmed to attack on Michelangelo’s birthday, had destroyed his hard drive. All his novellas and stories in progress were gone. The draft screenplay, though, was saved to external floppy disks. “It was, like, I guess I shouldn’t be writing fiction,” he told me. “It was a disaster, a life-changing disaster.” He dedicated himself to the movies.
His first film as writer-director was “Green Fish” (1998), a noir-ish gangster flick with notes of kung fu and Quentin Tarantino. The movie offered a sly critique of Korea’s rapid urbanization, and introduced the wayward types (bar girls, severely disabled men) that would populate all of Lee’s films. His second, “Peppermint Candy” (2000), turned Lee into a globally recognized auteur. The movie proceeds in reverse chronological order, through twenty years of Korea’s halting democratization and seven chapters in the life of an Everyman, played by the then unknown Sul Kyung-gu. After that came “Oasis” (2002), perhaps the most discomfiting movie I’ve ever seen. We meet Jong-du (Sul again), a young man with an intellectual disability, who has just been released from prison after taking the blame for a traffic death caused by his older brother. In a misguided gesture, he goes to the victim’s home to apologize and finds a young woman (Moon So-ri), the victim’s daughter, alone in a shambolic apartment. Her name is Gong-ju, “Princess,” and she has cerebral palsy—she struggles to speak and can’t walk. Jong-du tries to rape her. The two go on to develop a secret, unsettling friendship, then something more. Sean Baker told me that he admires the film’s “complete lack of judgment toward characters society actively rejects.” Lee won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 2002 Venice Film Festival.
By then, Korean corporations were heavy investors in culture. As Darcy Paquet, a chronicler of Korean cinema, who also translated the subtitles for “Possible Love,” has written, “Virtually all of the top-grossing Korean films had a chaebol investor.” But the chaebol also built U.S.-style multiplexes that banked on blockbusters, typically from Hollywood, thus undermining Korean films.
There was, on the books at least, some protection against foreign domination. South Korea had a “screen quota” law, requiring theatres to show domestic movies for at least a hundred and forty-six days per year. Enforcement, though, was spotty. In the nineties, amid the excitement of the Korean New Wave and efforts by the U.S. Motion Picture Association to grow its business in Asia, Lee and several of his colleagues from “To the Starry Island” joined the newly formed Screen Quota Watch Group, demanding that the government apply the law. Lee became the group’s spokesman.
Around 1998, after the Asian financial crisis, South Korea began to negotiate a bilateral investment treaty with the U.S. Remarkably, the screen quota emerged as the deal-breaker. “One of our requirements was for them to liberalize the quota,” Wendy Cutler, then an official with the U.S. Trade Representative, told me. The Korean side refused. “It was the major reason we weren’t able to negotiate the treaty,” Cutler said.
Five years later, a populist human-rights lawyer named Roh Moo-hyun became President. Members of the Watch Group, along with other influential artists, recommended that Roh appoint Lee as minister of culture. Lee got the job, but soon found himself in conflict with his industry peers. Roh wanted to negotiate a huge trade deal with the U.S.; as an olive branch, he would scale back the quota. Lee, who viewed the decision as inevitable and felt obliged to support Roh, made the announcement. “We express serious disappointment in Lee Chang-dong as minister,” the Watch Group said. “But we’ve resolved not to criticize him as a director.” Roh eventually halved the quota, and the U.S. and Korea signed a multibillion-dollar free-trade agreement that loosened barriers in nearly every sector of the economy. (By then, Lee had left the government.) The persistence of the screen-quota issue “was a surprise to me,” Kathleen Stephens, the U.S. Ambassador to Korea from 2008 to 2011, told me. “Americans underestimate how much interest there was in developing a film industry. Film was an important expression of national identity—in some ways, it was a sensitive sector, like agriculture, that had a cultural meaning beyond dollars and cents.”
Roh’s quota, though weakened, remains in place. (Earlier this year, during the sensational run of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” Korean theatre owners complained that it unfairly limited revenues.) The domestic market share of Korean movies has risen from sixteen per cent in 1993 to nearly sixty per cent today; Korean cinema is a seventeen-billion-dollar annual business. In the process of fighting for the quota, Lee said, “a bunch of us came together. There was a productive energy, a way of seeing—a way of seeing Korean society.”
Lee talks about his work in terms of exigencies: “Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a film?” At first, I interpreted this line of questioning as an acknowledgment of how costly—in money, time, and manpower—a feature can be. Later, I saw it as a test of social necessity. He told me, “I like to think, both for me and the audience, What is an important issue that we’re struggling with right now?”
His fourth film, “Secret Sunshine” (2007), was a movie about personal and historical forgiveness, told through the story of a widow—Jeon, the star of “Possible Love”—who loses her young son. Jeon won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance. “Poetry” (2010)—which débuted not long after the deaths of Lee’s older brothers, from illness, and the suicide of former President Roh, amid a corruption probe—considered the possibility of beauty in a world full of cruelty. The protagonist, Mi-ja, is an older woman who starts to write lyric poetry. Soon thereafter, she is diagnosed with dementia and learns that her grandson has committed serial rape. Yun Jung-hee, the legendary actress who plays Mi-ja, later disclosed that she had begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s during the shoot, in her mid-sixties, just like her character, giving strange new meaning to Lee’s naturalist approach.
Lee went on to teach screenwriting at the Korea National University of Arts. One student stuck out: Oh Jungmi, a master’s candidate with a background in Russian literature. “Among all my students, she had the most exceptional sense of emotion,” he told me. “She came from literature, so she wasn’t trapped inside the structures of film.” After Oh graduated, Lee asked her to be his writing partner. Oh helped him dig out from “too many of my own claustrophobic thoughts,” he said. Together, they wrote through a series of social convulsions, including a popular protest movement, in 2016, that would oust then President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of the man whose paramilitary censors had rejected Lee’s high-school poster.
What kind of film was necessitated by this moment? There was a great deal of anger—about government malfeasance, a widening wealth gap, and an impossibly tight labor market—especially among young Koreans like Oh. She and Lee explored an idea they nicknamed “the rage project.” As they tried out different characters and plots, the Japanese broadcaster NHK asked whether Lee would be interested in adapting the work of Haruki Murakami. Lee didn’t like Murakami’s brand of Surrealism, but he and Oh read through all of his short stories and kept returning to one titled “Barn Burning,” which involved a creepy, inscrutable arsonist.
Oh took the lead on the resulting screenplay and film, “Burning” (2018), which follows a twentysomething named Jong-su, an aspiring novelist with dismal prospects: no money, no connections, absent mom, locked-up dad. One day, he runs into and becomes infatuated with an old classmate, Hae-mi, who in turn gets entangled with Ben, a dewy, cosmopolitan man who drives a Porsche and professes to torch greenhouses—the vinyl kind that cover the Korean countryside—for fun. When Jong-su comes to believe that Ben has taken Hae-mi from him, he responds with violence—but is it real or imagined? There is no clear villain, and no resolution.
Lee’s previous films were populated by misfits; there had never been a character like Ben. La Frances Hui, a film curator at the Museum of Modern Art who organized a retrospective of Lee’s work, in 2019, told me that “Burning” is about the ways that modern life makes people “feel they’re no longer connected to the human spirit.” To Hui and many others, “Burning” was Lee’s finest film, richly imbued with metaphor and sensation: propaganda beamed over the border with North Korea, the thrum of Jong-su’s runs through Paju farmland, pink-orange light on Hae-mi’s skin. It was also criticized for being overly abstract. “There were a lot of people who said they didn’t understand it,” Lee told me. “That was also true of the crew and actors. They were, like, ‘What is this?’ ”
In 2022, I visited Lee at the offices of Pinehouse Films, a production company he runs with his younger brother, the producer Lee Joondong. Pinehouse is in an old Seoul neighborhood devoid of high-rises, and has the dreamy, analog quality—yellowed movie posters, metal filing cabinets—of a literary nonprofit.
Lee let me into a conference room for an impromptu screening. He and Oh had made a short film, titled “Heartbeat,” which, I would learn much later, was a seed for “Possible Love.” It was commissioned by the World Health Organization, as one of several shorts on the subject of mental health. In this version of the story, Ho-seok (Sul) has scaled a crane to protest the layoffs at his company, and Mi-ok (Jeon) is severely depressed. At school one day, their son, Cheol, has a premonition that something has happened to his mother. When she doesn’t answer her phone, he runs home. The camera stays fixed on his face. His racing pulse is audible, hence the title.
Two years later, I met Lee at a café in an upscale section of Gangnam. Lee arrived from the dentist. He’s had chronic trouble with his teeth, owing to a lack of early dental care—a detail that appears in his short stories. (He tends to smile with his lips squeezed shut.) There was, he said, finally momentum on his next feature. “Do you know the ‘Dekalog’?” he asked. He was referring to Kieślowski’s ten-part television series from 1989, based on the Ten Commandments. An American media company was looking to produce full-length films inspired by each episode. It would provide a writers’ fee, but the rest of the funding was still a question mark. Lee signed on with “Possible Love.”
Oh suggested the addition of the second, documentarian couple, Ye-ji and Sang-woo, whose presence both complicates the labor plot and makes its stakes more visible. “As time goes on, the workers break up. They disappear,” Lee explained. “The meaning of work itself dissipates. So then it’s the artist, the documentary director, who sets about to relay that experience.” With just Ho-seok and Mi-ok, Oh recalled telling Lee, “you might as well shoot a documentary.” The two couples collide at the funeral in the beginning of the film. Since the end of the strike, the SP workers have avoided one another. Now a motley crew shares a meal and paper cups of soju. Ho-seok enters reluctantly and sits apart from Mi-ok and Cheol. When he pours himself a second shot, Mi-ok intervenes, reminding him that he had promised not to drink, and they start to argue. Ho-seok notices that a video camera is trained on them, operated by Ye-ji, a small, pretty woman he doesn’t recognize. “Is this amusing? Do we amuse you?” he yells. Mi-ok, embarrassed, steps outside. Her wedding ring, which is loose, falls off her finger, and a tall, handsome stranger—Ye-ji’s husband, Sang-woo—helps her find it. By the time Ye-ji emerges from the funeral hall, she senses that Ho-seok “should be my film’s protagonist.”
Ye-ji decides that she must first win over Mi-ok. She makes her entreaty at a stylish café. The two women sit on the patio with Ye-ji’s conspicuously Western dog, a big yellow Labrador named Blue. Ye-ji is tastefully made-up, in a crisp white blouse and small diamond earrings; Mi-ok, who’s just finished her shift at a face-mask factory, has tousled hair and wears a T-shirt with garbled English branding. Planes roar overhead—Pyeongtaek is home to two U.S. military bases. Their chitchat is strained by the knowledge that the exchange is transactional. Ye-ji wants an interview, and Mi-ok enjoys the interest and attention. Anita Lee, the chief programmer of the Toronto International Film Festival, observed, “What is most powerful for me is how Lee looks at the small power nuances in personal relationships, whether between the couples, within the marriages, and then between the women.”
Lee shot the scene on a chilly fall morning, though it was supposed to take place on a hot summer day. He prefers to film in order, but with “Possible Love,” he’d had to proceed backward so that a beach scene toward the end could be filmed before the weather turned. “There’s no issue technically,” he told me in the car, on the way to the café. “But there can be in the characters’ feelings. You can’t see it with your eyes, but it’s there.” On set, the dog handler—a former student of Lee’s—walked Blue (played by Gamja, meaning “potato”) around on a leash, easing him back into his role. Lee gave the dog a cuddle. The crew played with camera angles to allay Lee’s fear that an autumnal tree might be reflected in the café window. When Jeon arrived, she was wrapped in a parka. “There’s steam coming out of my mouth! Steam!” she complained to Lee. “There’s a big, beautiful space inside the café. Do we have to shoot out here?” He smiled and gave her a reassuring pat.
The scene was heavy with dialogue. Ye-ji asks Mi-ok, “What was your childhood dream?” Mi-ok didn’t have that kind of upbringing. She answers elliptically, summoning a memory of playing with a hose at her mom’s workplace, a manual car wash. Her mother yanks it away. Mi-ok had merely wanted to glimpse a rainbow in the spray, but, she tells Ye-ji, “I guess she hated seeing me do that, worried I might end up doing such work, too.” The anecdote is precisely the kind of tragic material Ye-ji craves, so she asks Mi-ok to tell it again, this time for the camera. We watch the anecdote in flashback—the first Lee has ever used. “A flashback is going back to explain something, and explaining is not cinematic,” he told me. “But since this is a movie about documentary, I’ve included certain documentary forms. There’s a subtle ambiguity in the flashbacks in ‘Possible Love’—whether it’s an actual flashback that conveys what the speaker is saying or whether it’s Ye-ji imagining it.”
Kim, the cinematographer, shot the café scene from Ye-ji’s vantage point, straight on Mi-ok, then vice versa. Lee has used a different cinematographer on every movie while maintaining a steady style: long takes, natural focal length. The two women performed nervousness, as if on a first date. They went to Lee’s tent to receive feedback. You left out the “always” in that line. Swivel your body a bit. Say that part faster. He referred to them by their characters’ names.
Cast and crew broke for lunch at a sweet-and-sour-shrimp restaurant down the street. Sul Kyung-gu sat next to Lee. They talked baseball—both the World Series and the Korean Series were under way—as a group of women at another table ogled and snapped pictures. I asked Sul to describe Lee’s directing style. “It’s been twenty-three years since we worked together. It’s become more fun with him,” he said.
The next day, Lee invited me for breakfast at his country house in Gunsan. His wife had grown up in neighboring Jeonju, one of South Korea’s great food cities, and the politics of the province—historically self-reliant and left-wing—agreed with him. The house was a traditional hanok at the end of a small road, surrounded by farmland and the ubiquitous vinyl greenhouses of “Burning.” There was a wide stone wall on which someone had placed a row of ripe quinces from a nearby tree. Lee had spent much of the past few years modernizing the hanok. It retained its original log beams and sloping eaves, but had large windows and sliding glass doors. His wife was out for a swim. She had prepared us a meal of rice, doenjang stew, seaweed, various kimchi, and fruit salad. (Koreans do not cook one-pot meals.) In the dining room hung a small black-and-white photograph of Roh, the former President, riding a bicycle. He had autographed it with his signature phrase, “For a livable world.”
About two-thirds of the way through “Possible Love,” the two couples (plus Cheol) leave the industrial scrum of Pyeongtaek for Korea’s west coast, where Sang-woo owns a beach house that he inherited from his grandfather. Ho-seok has yet to be interviewed for the documentary, and Ye-ji, who treats her subjects as friends, hopes that a weekend of pampering will entice him to coöperate. Sang-woo’s grandfather had been a businessman and a police officer under the Japanese colonial government, before the Second World War; books and antiques from that period line every surface. The house is managed by a groundskeeper—Ye-ji and Sang-woo call him “our house fairy”—and a Chinese Korean domestic worker who prepares lavish foreign cuisine. Sang-woo, who’d previously refused to drink soju with Ho-seok and Mi-ok, gulps down a fifteen-hundred-dollar bottle of Gaja Chardonnay.
Oh told me that the vacation home allowed her to develop the idea, from “Burning,” that “something frightening” can lurk behind a beautiful façade. In “Possible Love,” the house and its seaside grounds concentrate all the diagonal yearnings of the two couples. The emotional landscape is heightened by birdcalls, splashing waves, and trees thrashing in the wind. Lee rarely adds music. Lee Seung-chul, his sound director since the late nineties, told me, “Like his naturalism of ‘not acting,’ there’s the naturalism of not inserting sound.” The action proceeds in a tensile pas de quatre. On the day after their arrival, Ho-seok agrees to sit for an interview. As Ye-ji sets up her camera, he tells Mi-ok to leave the room; he can’t seem to access his feelings in front of anyone close. Mi-ok walks down to the beach with Sang-woo, half flirting, half competing in a contest she doesn’t yet understand. Ho-seok, meanwhile, talks, finally—about the layoffs, the police, the union, a stunning act of betrayal by his “brothers.” “Solidarity, resistance, workers’ rights—I can’t stand it,” he says. “It’s all bullshit.” He hyperventilates and grabs his chest. Ye-ji keeps filming. Throughout the movie, her approach is often rapacious, or, at best, clueless. She pressures Mi-ok to manufacture cinematic conflict at her mask factory. She wears couture to meet laid-off workers.
Ye-ji’s surname is Lee, and other characters refer to her as “Director Lee.” The real Lee, in his seventies and on his seventh major film, was clearly questioning his own relationship to his subjects. “Possible Love” is about moviemaking and its pretensions to truth, whether in fiction or ostensible fact. Lee had interviewed laid-off SsangYong workers and their families for the script. One of the strike’s leaders, who recently watched the film in Korea, compared it to “a nicely gift-wrapped box that contains a white piece of paper, a white handkerchief, and an instruction manual on ‘how to remember.’ ”
Lee stacks many movies within the movie: Ye-ji’s documentary, archival clips, cellphone videos, flashbacks, dash-cam recordings, and a grid of CCTV security footage at the vacation house. Cheol acts as another camera. He stumbles into the shed in which the groundskeeper monitors the CCTV grid, watching the house, the bamboo wood, the four adults in their mystifying dance. He peeks through a door as the couples lose themselves in drunken karaoke. Lee told me that this aspect of Cheol came from a conversation with Kieślowski’s co-writer, Krzysztof Piesiewicz. “He said I was free to do what I wanted, but that he wanted to make one request,” Lee told me. In almost every episode of the “Dekalog,” an actor appears, only briefly, to watch what the main characters are doing. The fifth episode of the series, for example, depicts the brutal murder of a taxi-driver. Before the crime is committed, a construction worker stares at the perpetrator in the back of the vehicle. The stare “is transcendent,” Lee said. “It doesn’t seem entirely human. It feels like the gaze of a god. So Piesiewicz said, ‘If I could ask something of you, it would be to put something like that in your movie.’ I agreed. I had the thought that a child could be the one to possess this transcendent perspective.” (Piesiewicz died earlier this year.)
Last December, Lee returned to Seoul for postproduction, a phase he enjoys for its steady promise of improvement. “When you shoot, there’s no guarantee it’ll get good,” Lee told me. “But with postproduction, the more you do, the better it gets.” Steven Yeun told me that, when he saw Lee earlier this year, “He seemed to be in a very joyful place. It felt like he had transcended the need to hold everything by himself. That he could perhaps lean on other people to fill in the voids of the story for him.”
While Lee was in edits, his friend Park Chan-wook released “No Other Choice,” which is also about a laid-off Korean worker and his family, but picks up the theme of corporate greed in a homicidal, comic register. In one scene, the worker’s wife informs their children that their Netflix subscription will have to be cancelled, as part of the family’s belt-tightening. The adolescent son, never without his tablet, immediately opens the Netflix app—“ta-dum”—and heads up to his room for a final binge.
Since the pandemic, the film industry has flagged all over the world—Korean theatre revenue fell to half of what it was before, and is only just starting to rebound. Despite Lee’s stature and the relative thrift of “Possible Love” (its budget was in the single-digit millions), he had trouble securing funding. “All the money is going to ‘K-contents’—TV series and dramas,” Lee told me. Pinehouse had been publicly critical of the impact of on-demand consumption, and Lee and his brother were lovers of the traditional movie house. But last year they shook hands with Netflix Korea. The company provided the requested budget, and agreed to give “Possible Love” a brief theatrical run before it hits the app in November. (Lee withdrew from the “Dekalog” project but included the Tenth Commandment, “Thou shalt not covet,” as an epigraph.) “Those of us who make films for the theatre can’t just go head to head with Netflix in a zero-sum way,” Lee told me. “We have to figure out some kind of symbiosis.”
Whatever Lee’s initial misgivings, Netflix—which, in 2023, announced a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar investment in Korean television series and movies—threw its weight behind the project. On the fall film-festival circuit, Lee had a dozen-plus publicists and a dedicated English interpreter; the cast appeared on red carpets and magazine covers. At the Venice Film Festival, in September, “Possible Love” won the Grand Jury Prize. An Oscar campaign was under way. Netflix licensed all of Lee’s films to stream, and organized career retrospectives in New York and Los Angeles.
A few weeks ago, I saw Lee at the Toronto International Film Festival. He had just arrived from Venice, and hadn’t slept in more than thirty-six hours, he told me, but seemed energized by the crowd. He posed outside the Royal York Hotel with Sul, Cho, and Zo. (Jeon was in New York, rehearsing for a Korean-language adaptation of “The Cherry Orchard.”) Inside, Lee received one of the night’s highest honors, the Ebert Director Award, named after the late critic Roger Ebert. “People sometimes think that I’m a younger filmmaker than I actually am,” Lee joked in his acceptance speech. “Possibly because I haven’t made very many films.”
The following night was the North American première of “Possible Love,” at the Princess of Wales Theatre, a grand, balconied venue with murals by Frank Stella and two thousand velvety seats. I noticed that, in the opening production credits, the animated Netflix logo appeared without the accompanying “ta-dum.” I’d previously watched “Possible Love” at small press screenings; now, all around me, were laughs, gasps, deep breaths. The movie runs long, at two hours and forty-four minutes. When Lee got onstage after the credits, he said, “I am a bit concerned. I feel like some of you might really have to run to the bathroom.”
Last year, in Seoul, I’d asked Lee to explain his devotion to the physical cinema. It wasn’t only about the beauty of the space or the size of the screen. It was “about watching all together or watching alone,” he told me. “The collective experience is something you feel with your skin. And now that’s changing. That essence is changing.” ♦