Venice Film Festival: Love is possible

People who keep secrets from each other. First of all, there is the Korean director Lee Chang-dong, who entered the Venice competition with a seemingly straightforward entry. “Possible Love” tells the story of two unlikely couples who are brought together by a documentary film project: The filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) accompanies laid-off factory workers in order to record their fates. She meets the unemployed Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), who herself is employed in a factory.

Ye-ji is fascinated by the taciturn Ho-seok and the outgoing Mi-ok. She soon visits the family at home and they seem to become friends. Meanwhile, Mi-ok is impressed by Ye-ji's rich husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). He reminds her of Steve Jobs, for whom she had a soft spot at the time, but Sang-woo does something with hedge funds.

Lee Chang-dong, who received international acclaim for his 2018 feature film “Burning,” unfolds this social micro-experiment of “Possible Love,” in which rich and poor develop an unexpected closeness to one another, during the filming of Ye-ji’s film. All the characters seem likeable in their own right, Ye-ji shows serious interest with her commitment, Mi-ok seems to have a crush on Sang-woo and his self-confidently polite manner, and even Ho-seok, who is traumatized by his situation, is quite moving in his armored helplessness.

From the very beginning, however, Lee Chang-dong scatters details with which he disrupts this supposed harmony. In one of the first scenes, before the couples even get to know each other, Ye-ji is filming a memorial service for one of Ho-seok's deceased factory colleagues. When he starts to freak out, she attacks him with the camera until Ho-seok becomes outraged. Elsewhere, Mi-ok admires Ye-ji's elegant shirt, only to point out a little later that such an outfit is a bit inappropriate for filming at a union.

The intrusive look that Ye-ji's camera symbolizes runs like a leitmotif through the film. It serves Lee Chang-dong primarily to reveal the actual motives of those involved. Of course, things can't go well in the long run, but it only really gets out of hand at the end. Having this bow carry for more than two and a half hours is no small credit to “Possible Love.”

Marie (Mathilde Arcel) also has secrets in “Kvinde ukendt” (Unknown Woman) by May el-Toukhy, who is the only female director in the competition. Marie, a housemaid, is about to marry her landlord, a factory owner. It is 1945, shortly after the end of the German occupation.

Then Marie suddenly meets an old school friend on the street who forces her to go out for a drink with him. At the meeting he suggests that she became pregnant by a German during the war, of her own free will. As part of the resistance, he tracks down Nazi collaborators like her and indirectly threatens her.

Marie soon has to explain why there is a swastika on the front door and why people are whispering about her in the house. May el-Toukhy stages the story against a solid historical backdrop in which the characters meet each other with stiff formality. Mathilde Arcel plays the alarmed Marie with pinched fear. Unfortunately, she is one of the few developed characters. The rest of the staff remains quite one-dimensional.