Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love is now on Netflix, and you can see everything streaming through Ye-ji’s attempt to film a factory-worker story. The movie follows her as that plan gets pulled into the lives of Ho-seok and Mi-ok, a working-class couple whose home life does not stay safely off camera. What starts as a documentary assignment becomes a relationship with consequences for everyone in it.
Ye-ji’s grant pitch
Ye-ji is a novice filmmaker who applies for a grant to finance her project early in the film. One panelist pushes back and asks whether she should be focusing on something more current, like A.I., which places her subject choice in direct competition with the kind of topic funders think is timely.
That framing matters because Ye-ji is not chasing a celebrity profile or a polished feature subject. She wants to capture the state of South Korea’s factory workers, and the film keeps bringing that ambition back to the cost of looking at people who are already under strain.
Ho-seok and Mi-ok
Ho-seok is a welder whose company was bought and stripped for parts by a private equity firm, and he is still reeling two years later from his union’s brutal confrontation with the police. He can barely talk about anything at all, including in group therapy sessions for laid-off workers, where many of the men still have not found new jobs.
Ye-ji first meets him at a funeral for one of his former colleagues who died by suicide, and she first meets Mi-ok there because Ho-seok cannot bear to go inside. That opening places the film in the aftermath of layoffs and loss before Ye-ji has even started filming in earnest.
Mi-ok and Ye-ji
Ye-ji and Mi-ok develop a real friendship, and the movie does not flatten them into a simple predator-and-subject setup. Mi-ok tells Ye-ji about her mother working in a car wash, and she says her mother became upset when she saw her daughter playing with a hose because she did not want her daughter to live the same difficult life she had.
Ye-ji replies, “That’s a great story,” and asks Mi-ok to wait while she gets her camera so she can tell it again. While Ye-ji runs back to her car, Mi-ok secretly photographs Ye-ji’s fancy leather backpack and searches the image to find out how much it costs, which turns a small object into the clearest sign of the gulf between them.
The nearly three-hour length gives that shift room to breathe. The film lets the friendship grow naturally, then lets the camera and the class difference keep making it unequal, which is the unresolved pressure point that hangs over Ye-ji, Mi-ok, and Ho-seok by the end.
