Lee Chang-dong's A Possible Love on Netflix asks who gets to tell your story

Lee Chang-dong doesn't rush. The 72-year-old Korean director has made just seven features in 30 years, and his latest, A Possible Love, is now on Netflix. It's a slow, uncomfortable drama about class, and it doesn't hand you easy answers.

What happened?

This is Lee's first film since Burning (2018). It won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

The story links two couples divided by money. Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) are a working-class pair whose lives were shaped by industrial layoffs. On the other side are Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentary-maker, and her wealthy husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).

Ye-ji is making a film about the fallout of industrial restructuring. That brings the couples together, but it also creates an uneven relationship. One side has the tools to portray reality. The other has to live it.

Why is everyone talking about it?

The idea goes back decades. In 2009, mass layoffs at carmaker SsangYong led to a long workers' strike that authorities violently cracked down on. Lee says he saw it as a turning point for Korea's labour movement and for its whole economic structure.

He even abandoned the project after writing the script, unable to justify telling it as fiction rather than a documentary. Co-writer Oh Jung-mi solved it by suggesting the documentary-maker character. Suddenly the film was also about who gets to represent whom.

Lee asks the question of himself too. Filmmakers in Korea, he says, must ask whether they treat these problems honestly or simply use other people's suffering as material for their own work.

The film avoids cartoon villains. The rich aren't mocked, and the workers aren't saints. Losing a job also means losing an identity built around being the provider, and that pain finally erupts in front of the camera.

Did we see this coming?

Sort of. Lee reunites with two longtime collaborators. Jeon Do-yeon won best actress at Cannes in 2007 for Secret Sunshine, and Sul Kyung-gu starred in his early films Peppermint Candy and Oasis.

Burning, his previous film, premiered in competition at Cannes in 2018 and won the FIPRESCI prize.

What's next?

If you like slow-burn cinema that makes you squirm a little, set aside an evening. Just don't expect a tidy moral at the end.