I love watching movies and I have for a very long time. This love of watching movies has slowly turned into an unpaid part-time job of writing about movies. A lot of the time I’m expected to cover films when I’m sent a screener for a film, especially when it’s before the movie’s release. I will never complain about having this privilege, but what I will say is that it’s hard to write about every movie. Sometimes it’s because I don’t have the time that I thought I did, or it’s that I just can’t come up with enough to write a 500 word review. If we look at the movie in the title of this article, it’s because the movie just wasn’t for me. So this will probably be short and hopefully sweet.
Possible Love is a film that makes me wish I had a time machine to head to the future to see how I would have felt about it before watching it. Like the subjects of this film, I guess I could have done some research on the subject matter before pressing play. That would have been easier. Since I didn’t have time to learn how to time travel or do research apparently, I subjected myself to the most painstaking three hours of my movie watching year. Since I typically go out of my way to avoid documentaries, and this felt like doubling down on documentaries, this was a rough one for me to have any ounce of care for. I hate to double down on my quick feelings about a movie overall, but it was important I made those last two points. It was like documentaryception.
Lee Chang-dong’s direction is, to put it lightly, unique. Unique can be a bad thing, but luckily here it was at least different enough to keep my attention when the subject matter couldn’t on its own. The way he moves the camera around the players while also holding a camera for themselves made for a personal and up close look at everything in this world. The world he is showing is the world of the workforce and the issues it can cause for the people inside and outside of it. What really blurs the line with this is that you have a rich couple making the documentary and not someone on the same financial level as the subjects.
I wish this film shortened things up and didn’t lose focus so often. Having human subjects obviously leads to emotions that weren’t in the plan. With the type of time that needs to be put into a work like this, inside and outside the confines of the fiction, you get a lot of connections. Those connections never feel genuine. Instead of feeling like crossed lives, they feel uncrossed and more like oil and water.
I alluded to it before but I think the biggest reason I couldn’t have concern towards this film was because of it being about those labor struggles. As a human being with a full time job that involves labor, I obviously care about the politics that go into that. I also care about the human dimensions of these things. Just like courtroom dramas, there’s something in my brain that doesn’t care about these matters in the film realm. I need to escape. Not be brought back into my real world. With a movie this long, it feels like there should have been more touch on but there just wasn’t. It takes the little it has and just drags on and on and on.
This fake documentary feels awkward more than not and after all the I struggle to even have a score to give. This movie seems to be captivating the rest of the globe, but I couldn’t seem to understand why.
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