Lee Chang Dong ponders the ethics of the camera

Lee Chang Dong’s seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff – 2,600 employees – after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor or religion or compressed modernity, that uniquely Korean affliction, without feeling didactic.

A different kind of movie would have captured the heat of that labor struggle. Possible Lovepicks up with the characters in the aftermath, a murkier time that defies easy understanding. The film opens with an epigraph: “Thou shall not covet.” What follows is a movie about characters who covet. They covet each other’s job, designer clothes, spouses, and positionality. Mi-ok (Jeon Do-Yeon) is the long-suffering wife of Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), her laid-off husband. At a funeral of a colleague who died...

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