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144 Minutes to Tell Us What We Already Know
*Possible Love* tells us a story that Korean cinema has repeated to exhaustion: social inequality, labor exploitation, and the divide between rich and poor.
This time, Lee Chang-dong uses two married couples from very different economic backgrounds. One enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, while the other struggles with unemployment, the aftermath of a labor strike, and a deteriorating marriage.
The problem isn't the subject matter, but how little the film manages to do with it over its 144-minute runtime.
The pacing is almost sleep-inducing. Scenes drag on unnecessarily, silences abound, and conversations unfold at an exasperatingly sluggish pace. New events are introduced, but they rarely generate dramatic progress proportionate to the time spent on them.
Ho-seok is a character consumed by resentment. His involvement in a labor strike, the injuries he sustained, and the abandonment by his fellow workers explain his bitterness. However, the screenplay dwells so heavily on his misery that it ends up reducing much of his personality to that suffering.
His emotional breakdown during the final interview is a perfect example. The character goes from being reserved to completely losing control, in an outburst whose intensity feels exaggerated compared to what the film has established. The issue isn't whether he has reasons to suffer, but how the director chooses to portray that suffering.
Meanwhile, the documentary filmmaking couple records practically every aspect of the working-class couple's private life. What begins as an observational project gradually becomes an intrusion into their intimacy. There was plenty of material here for a far more compelling conflict: people who set out to document other people's problems end up becoming directly involved in them. Yet the film spends more time observing these relationships than developing the consequences of that involvement.
The ending doesn't change much either. After visiting the documentary filmmakers' luxurious beach house, Ye-ji realizes that she doesn't belong in their world and decides to leave with her husband. They return to their reality carrying essentially the same problems they had from the beginning.
A film doesn't need to provide solutions or happy endings. Nor does it need to move at a fast pace. But slowness must serve a narrative purpose, and conflicts need enough development to justify the time devoted to them.
*Possible Love* insists on a familiar social critique but fails to offer a sufficiently fresh cinematic perspective to justify nearly two and a half hours.
**Social inequality is not a revelation. And retelling a familiar story at an exasperatingly slow pace does not automatically turn it into a profound work of cinema.**
This time, Lee Chang-dong uses two married couples from very different economic backgrounds. One enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, while the other struggles with unemployment, the aftermath of a labor strike, and a deteriorating marriage.
The problem isn't the subject matter, but how little the film manages to do with it over its 144-minute runtime.
The pacing is almost sleep-inducing. Scenes drag on unnecessarily, silences abound, and conversations unfold at an exasperatingly sluggish pace. New events are introduced, but they rarely generate dramatic progress proportionate to the time spent on them.
Ho-seok is a character consumed by resentment. His involvement in a labor strike, the injuries he sustained, and the abandonment by his fellow workers explain his bitterness. However, the screenplay dwells so heavily on his misery that it ends up reducing much of his personality to that suffering.
His emotional breakdown during the final interview is a perfect example. The character goes from being reserved to completely losing control, in an outburst whose intensity feels exaggerated compared to what the film has established. The issue isn't whether he has reasons to suffer, but how the director chooses to portray that suffering.
Meanwhile, the documentary filmmaking couple records practically every aspect of the working-class couple's private life. What begins as an observational project gradually becomes an intrusion into their intimacy. There was plenty of material here for a far more compelling conflict: people who set out to document other people's problems end up becoming directly involved in them. Yet the film spends more time observing these relationships than developing the consequences of that involvement.
The ending doesn't change much either. After visiting the documentary filmmakers' luxurious beach house, Ye-ji realizes that she doesn't belong in their world and decides to leave with her husband. They return to their reality carrying essentially the same problems they had from the beginning.
A film doesn't need to provide solutions or happy endings. Nor does it need to move at a fast pace. But slowness must serve a narrative purpose, and conflicts need enough development to justify the time devoted to them.
*Possible Love* insists on a familiar social critique but fails to offer a sufficiently fresh cinematic perspective to justify nearly two and a half hours.
**Social inequality is not a revelation. And retelling a familiar story at an exasperatingly slow pace does not automatically turn it into a profound work of cinema.**
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