Ennesimo, straordinario, film politico e umanista di Lee
Chang-dong che si smarca da ogni paletto produttivo imponendo lo scarto di
senso come necessario punto di vista sul mondo. VENEZIA 83. Concorso.
Dopo il magnifico “acquarello su carta di riso” capace di
sussurrare i misteri di una “gioventù condannata all’impossibilità del lavoro”
(come scriveva Aldo Spiniello su Burning sette anni fa), Lee Chang-dong torna
alla regia ed è come essere sempre stati lì. Ossia, in una delle sue tante
ellissi dove il tempo passa nei disaccordi delle inquadrature, mentre il cinema
trova istantanei e imprevisti raccordi nel nostro sguardo. Possible Love,
quindi. Siamo a Seul, nell’attuale panorama lavorativo in profondo cambiamento,
alle prese con l’ennesima rivoluzione tecnologia che trasmigra metodi e
processi industriali negli istantanei algoritmi dell’intelligenza artificiale.
Una fase storica disorientante che fa recepire come “inevitabili” un
licenziamento di massa o la violenta repressione di uno sciopero. E, per di
più, con la semplificazione del linguaggio social che crea vertigini di senso:
“prima del licenziamento ero considerato aristocrazia operaia, un conservatore;
dopo sono diventato un comunista solo perché reclamo diritti”, dice un ex
operaio.
In questo panorama, il cinema deve ritrovare un’etica della
forma adatta a testimoniare la complessità del nostro presente. Come fare? Lo
spunto narrativo di Possible Love è quello di seguire la produzione di un
documentario autoprodotto dal personaggio di Ye-Ji, una giovane cineasta
animata da sincera passione per il cinema ma totalmente impreparata alle
implicazioni etiche della scelta di un punto di vista sul mondo. Ye-ji è la
moglie di un ricchissimo investitore che opera nelle Big Tech: “tu non sei come
loro ma è bello che te ne interessi”, le dice lui con (in)volontaria postura
classista che sfiora “la freddezza dell’AI”. Ye-ji rimuove queste ambiguità
facendo slittare il suo documentario sociale verso la singola storia di un
operaio e della sua famiglia. Ho-seok è “un morto”, come vengono soprannominati
i licenziati delle multinazionali per distinguerli dai “vivi” che hanno ancora
un lavoro. Ma Ho-seok è “un morto” anche e soprattutto perché non riesce a
elaborare una profondissima depressione che lo pone sempre al margine della
nostra inquadratura, anche quando è forzatamente al centro del film d’inchiesta
di Ye-ji.
Eccoci al punto. Lee Chang-dong è ormai straordinariamente
consapevole del proprio discorso estetico sedimentato in quasi trent’anni di
carriera, tanto da metterlo felicemente in dialettica con nuove istanze
produttive. Dall’omaggio al Decalogo kieslowskiano (straniante leggere tra i
produttori il nome di Krzysztof Piesiewicz) che implica una esplicitazione del
dilemma morale a monte; alla coproduzione Netflix e alla conseguente esigenza
di una chiarezza informativa da docudrama che il film assolve con grande
maestria attraverso l’espediente del meta-cinema. Al di là delle costanti
linguistiche da word cinema transnazionale supportato dalle piattaforme,
quindi, lo sguardo di Lee Chang-dong si smarca ben presto dai paletti
produttivi inabissando ogni linea d’azione codificata con le sue consuete
digressioni umaniste. Digressioni che impongono gli scarti di senso come focus
di ogni inchiesta sociale. Perché il regista di Secret Sunshine predilige da
sempre l’imprevisto umano alle strutture codificate: le libere associazioni
sentimentali e spaziotemporali che erompono nei racconti di Mi-ok (moglie di
Ho-seok) iniziano a calamitare il film e a dettare i tempi del montaggio. In
questo libero flusso di parole e immagini Ye-ji non trova mai il momento giusto
per iniziare a riprendere o fermare la sua telecamera. Il suo documentario didattico
è ormai la maschera della sua contraddizione.
L’inchiesta sui licenziamenti di massa e sul panorama
lavorativo improntato a una spietata erosione dei diritti si scioglie quindi
nelle microstorie, nei ricordi e negli sguardi di tre personaggi emotivamente
capaci di testimoniare le verità di una crisi esistenziale prima ancora che
lavorativa. I ricordi di Mi-ok sui suoi sogni di bambina e sul tempo dei
sorrisi con Ho-seok; i movimenti guardinghi del figlio Cheol che si nasconde
dalle inquadrature del documentario e impone con le sue soggettive uno sguardo
laterale e istintivamente complice (quello di Lee Chang-dong, ovviamente);
infine, il lento pedinamento dei “vivi” da parte Ho-seok che scopre di “essere
morto” non solo per aver perso un lavoro ma soprattutto per non avere più nulla
da dire e dare ai propri affetti. Una sequenza potentissima che anticipa la
scintilla di un cambiamento.
Nella frequentazione sempre più assidua tra due nuclei
familiari così distanti Lee Chang-dong allude a tante potenziali trame di
genere (il melodramma su amori impossibili alla Kim Ki-duk, il thriller sociale
sul conflitto di classe alla Bong Joon-ho, il racconto di formazione silenzioso
alla Edward Yang), ma lascia sfumare con sublime naturalezza tutte queste storie
possibili nel fluire imprevedibile della vita e nelle altalene emotive dei suoi
personaggi. Perché è nel corso del tempo che Possible Love si libera da ogni
paletto produttivo o riflessione teorica (seppur presente) per trasformare le
misteriose azioni dei suoi personaggi in commoventi epifanie visive e
narrative. Questo è uno straordinario film politico sull’atto del filmare nel
XXI seco
Pubblicato su sentieriselvaggi.it, 6 Settembre 2026 di Pietro Masciullo
[Editor’s note: This review was originally
published on September 6, 2026 at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. Netflix will
release “Possible Love” in theaters on Friday, October 23 before it streams
beginning on November 6.]
Another
heart-stopping and novelistically layered stunner from modern cinema’s most
literary auteur (a fiction author himself), Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love”
might be dedicated to the memory of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog 10,” but
let’s dispel any notion of it being a remake. Conceived independently, and then
lumped during pre-production into the same tribute omnibus that kicked off with
Asghar Farhadi’s dreadful “Parallel Tales” at Cannes this year this film shares
nothing in common with the final episode of Kieślowski’s series beyond the
biblical commandment that Lee splays on screen at the very start: “Thou shalt
not covet.”
And even
then, the evidence of that instruction proves elusive in this sprawling drama
about two very different couples who are brought together by the violent
suppression of a workers’ strike at a major Korean metals factory. Who is
coveting what, exactly? It’s simple enough to understand what the film’s
characters want on the surface — or at least that’s true of its women. A
casually rich dilettante whose pale skin glows with the same lustrousness as
her salon-perfect bob, first-time director Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong, similarly cast
as the rich mom in “Parasite”) hopes to make a documentary about the declining
state of labor across South Korea, with a particular focus on the recent unrest
at a business called SP Heavy Industries. Although we see Ye-ji pitching the
project to a grant board of some kind, the presumption is that most of her
funding — and all of her creative freedom — has been provided by her
imperiously chiseled husband Sang-woo (Lee newcomer Zo In-sung), a trust fund
type who appears to enjoy a rather frictionless existence.
On the
other side of the economic divide, the plucky but sad-eyed Mi-ok (played by
“Secret Sunshine” actress Jeon Do-yeon, who delivers another once-a-century
performance less than 20 years since her first collaboration with Lee) is
clearly willing to do whatever it takes to bring her husband back to life. One
of the “dead” who lost his job and sense of purpose in the mass layoffs at SP
two years ago, her taciturn and implosive Ho-seok (“Peppermint Candy” star Sul
Kyung-gu) has been a shell of himself since being injured amid the crackdown
that ended the ensuing strike, and Mi-ok hopes that participating in Ye-ji’s
doc might allow him to process his trauma — to stop shuffling around like a
zombie and snap back into the man she once fell in love with as a teenage
seamstress who didn’t have any better options. That he might become a more
present father to their young son Cheol, whose current rudderlessness is best
expressed by his abject incompetence at Taekwondo.
Beyond that
simple baseline, the matrix of desire at work in Lee and Oh Jung-mi’s
remarkably nuanced script is too slippery to pin down until the movie’s velvet
gutpunch of a final scene. Yes, Mi-ok lusts after Ye-ji’s elegant wardrobe and
designer handbags, and there’s an unspoken sexual charge in the air whenever
she’s alone with Sang-woo (a charge that eventually sets fire to an
unforgettable pre-dawn sequence on a private beach in the third act). But it
would be unwisely reductive to conclude that the working-class woman is jealous
of her hyper-affluent new bestie, just as it would be unhelpfully rash to
assume that envy plays a more pivotal role in this story than resentment, or
that a film as mottled and probing as “Possible Love” might be content to
retrench the divide between Korea’s haves and have-nots.
Lee is
perfectly happy to inflame our anger towards the one percent, and the movie’s
jagged script — first inspired by a similar incident at a massive Korean
company more than 10 years ago — is at its broadest when poking fun at how
blithely Ye-ji inserts herself into Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s blue-collar world. She
wants to be a fly on the wall in their downtrodden factory town, but the
pampered documentarian stands out like a Maybach at a monastery; despite
growing up without a silver spoon in her mouth, she rages at her inability to
code-switch back to a lower rung on the financial ladder.
As the
story goes on and Ye-ji convinces Mi-ok and Ho-seok to join them for a weekend
at Sang-woo’s luxurious vacation house along the country’s western coast (all
the better to entrap the couple on her turf where she can film them at all
hours of the day), Lee finds a devious variety of ways to weaponize the running
visual gag in which an intimate scene pans over to find Ye-ji hiding in the
corner with her camera. It’s admirable that she wants to highlight how workers
are being left behind as the ownership class automates their businesses in
order to hoard their wealth, but Ye-ji fails to recognize the many
condescending ways that she infringes upon her subjects’ dignity, as if — in a
world where labor is increasingly rendered invisible from the people who profit
from it — people like Mi-ok and Ho-seok should feel lucky to be seen at all.
In contrast
to Lee’s monumental and more explosive “Burning,” the story he tells here
builds on an instance of terrible violence rather than building to it, but his
latest film simmers to a boil at a similar clip, and likewise alternates long
dialogue scenes with indelible moments of visual acuity. While it’s hard for
this comparatively restrained domestic saga to compete with Jeon Jong-seo’s
sunset dance along the DMZ, Lee retains his gift for whipping spectacle out of
thin air — for infusing something as routine as a car ride home or a quick dip
in the ocean with an overwhelming degree of silent pathos. Every moment in
“Possible Love” crackles like a wicked symphony of striated socioeconomic
abrasion; every gesture, comment, and detail sharpens the strange geometry that
brings these people closer together at the same time as it deepens the divides
that will ultimately keep them apart.
Sometimes,
in a handful of judiciously deployed moments, that geometry is expressed in
skin-crawling fashion. Case in point: Sang-woo keeps an antique whistle on the
living room mantle of his summer palace, and the resident “house fairy” — a
seemingly non-verbal groundskeeper who Sang-woo used to play with when they
were kids — is conditioned to come running whenever he blows on it. For the
most part, however, the distance between the film’s characters is conveyed in
subtler terms; in the confidence of Sang-woo’s upright posture, the brittleness
of Mi-ok’s wavy hair, and the brusque impenetrability of Ho-seok’s blank stare,
which doesn’t suggest the absence of an inner life so much as it betrays the
constant struggle to bottle up his demons. He’s a prisoner of the pain that
Ye-ji breezily documents like a tourist.
The careful
attention that Lee pays to his characters’ bodies and how they wear them pays
off — enormously — after “Possible Love” relocates to Sang-woo’s summer home
for this 164-minute film’s last hour (“This is like a house from a novel I
haven’t read,” Mi-ok gawps over dinner). Between a night of drunken karaoke and
a few pre-dawn strolls along the mansion’s private beach, the movie’s financially
driven exploration of freedom and power begin to assume a more physical
dimension, a transition which threatens to confuse the dynamics that have
otherwise tethered everyone to their roles; this is where Jeon seizes control,
her raw and marbled performance reaching a state of self-preservation so primal
that it renders the rest of the characters senseless.
“Possible Love” takes brilliant — if unnerving
— pleasure in leveling the playing field between its two couples, but those
shifty indulgences are too freighted with reality to feel like wish
fulfillment. The film isn’t naive enough to pretend that its “poor” characters
might ever achieve true equilibrium with its rich ones, nor is it patronizing
enough to suggest that there’s some kind of implicit dignity to being exploited
by the carelessness of late capitalism. Ho-seok is not a holy sufferer, he’s a
profoundly broken and embittered man whose plight speaks to the hopelessness of
fighting back against a system that’s designed to trample people like him, and
Lee is far more interested in rendering his pain than he is in “solving” it.
The
ultimate power of “Possible Love,” which grows in the mind after it’s over (and
greatly rewards any repeat viewings), is rooted in neither wanton despair nor
false optimism. Despite being steeped in the sadness and frustration of the
working class, Lee’s drama uses its film-within-a-film construct to refract the
moral valences of labor through the prism of what people actually earn through
their work.
Slumming it
as a documentarian as she builds towards her dream of being a narrative
filmmaker (“Imagining things is my hobby” is maybe not what you want to hear
from the person directing a documentary about your life), Ye-ji is a victim of
her own second-hand affluence — the seamlessness of her life has life has made
it so that she has to performatively “method act” in order to get close to her
subjects and shoot anything real. Her observational technique is a parody of
the invisible labor that she laments noticing the first time during a trip to a
luxurious Qattari hotel, but she can’t even see people like Mi-ok and Ho-seok
unless she contrives a scenario for them to exist for her camera.
For his
part, Sang-woo’s work is so frictionless that he can buy and sell entire
companies from his laptop while sipping a latte, and his marriage to Ye-ji
feels like it’s laminated in plastic. They passively snipe at each other in
short bursts so as not to get any dirt on the bedsheets, and relegate all of
their latent desires to the blind spots that rich people create so that they
don’t have to see the world beyond their own wealth.
By
contrast, Mi-ok and Ho-seok have no choice but to confront the hardships that
have been visited upon them, and to want for things so badly they can never
lose sight of the work they’ve put into each other. Their lives are principled
upon a possible love, because they don’t have the luxury of pretending there’s
any other kind. Yes, their history together — fleshed out in a series of
perfectly modulated flashbacks — is clumsy and imperfect, and their financial
prospects for the future are tenuous at best, but they will never have to covet
what this world still offers to people for free. Mi-ok and Ho-seok have always
felt as if the moon shined only for them at night, and the final moments of
this gently shattering and astonishingly well-shaded drama exalt in the freedom
they give to each other by saving its glow for themselves.
Pubblicato su indiewire.com , David Ehrlich October 21, 2026