Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Possible Love
2026 · Lee Chang-dong · Possible Love on Sightlines
Start with a woman who has a camera and nothing to point it at. Ye-ji, a documentary filmmaker, has been trying to make a film about mass layoffs, and she cannot find her subject. Then she finds Mi-ok, who works in a paper factory, in a household the layoffs have already reached. The whole of Possible Love grows out of that turn of the lens. Once the camera brings the two couples together, both homes begin to crack.
It's worth staying with the problem for a moment before the film solves it. Ye-ji wants to make a film about thousands of people losing their work, and she can't find anyone to film. Korea has argued about industrial redundancy since the financial crisis of 1997–98, so the layoffs are real enough. What Ye-ji lacks is a person who can stand for them.
Gilles Deleuze has a phrase for this, and it is one of his plainest: the people are missing. He meant that political filmmakers after the war could no longer assume a ready-made people waiting to be shown, a class that already knew itself and only needed a camera to record it. A modern political film has to start from that absence. It can't simply document a people. At best it can help one come into being. Ye-ji's stalled documentary turns that absence into plot. Lee doesn't let her, or us, believe the gap closes on the day she meets Mi-ok. Choosing one worker to embody “the laid-off” solves a casting problem. Whether it solves anything else is the question the film opens and leaves with us.
Lee has been circling this question since before he directed anything. He co-wrote A Single Spark (1995), in which a middle-class intellectual writes the life of the labour martyr Jeon Tae-il. The worker's story reaches us through someone who is not a worker, and the act of telling it becomes a subject of its own. Poetry (2010) turned the same pressure inward. An old woman writes a poem while a real girl's suffering sits beside her art, and the film never lets us settle whether her poem is witness or exploitation. Possible Love inherits both films. The difference is that the person doing the representing now holds a camera, so the question falls on the very medium Lee is using.
Deleuze gives a name to what happens when one camera speaks for someone else: free indirect discourse, in its political form. The term comes from literature, from sentences where the narrator's voice and a character's thoughts run together until you can't say who is speaking. In cinema it describes a camera whose way of seeing blends with the vision of the person it films. Ye-ji's camera is exactly this kind of voice. When she films Mi-ok, whose film is it? It is hers, because she is the author. It is Mi-ok's, because it is Mi-ok's life. And behind Ye-ji's camera there is a second one, Lee's, so every one of her shoots involves two people speaking for others at once.
Here the film moves into territory Deleuze explored through the documentaries of Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault. He thought documentary became most alive when it stopped trying to catch people unawares and caught them instead “in the act of legending”, telling the story of themselves in front of the lens. He called this fabulation. It isn't lying. It is the way a filmed person becomes a subject and not a specimen. In Possible Love, Ye-ji's shoots set one couple inside the other's frame, and performing and presenting oneself become part of the drama. Being filmed is something that happens to Mi-ok and her husband Ho-seok, and it is also something they do. Meanwhile the comfortable couple, Ye-ji and her husband Sang-woo, watch them do it. Then the performances leak. Hidden desires surface in both houses, and not only in the poor one.
There is an older idea folded in here, which Deleuze borrowed from Brecht: the gest, a posture of the body that exposes a social relation. A worker composing herself for a filmmaker's camera doesn't need a line of dialogue to show where each of them stands. The pose is the class relation, made visible.
That is why Lee's casting matters so much. In Peppermint Candy he discovered how to use Sul Kyung-gu: a single body carrying the damage Korea's industrialisation does to a man. Deleuze called this kind of thing a cinema of the body, where tiredness, posture and the everyday weight of a person hold time and history more truthfully than the plot can. Sul now returns as the husband in a household hit by layoffs. Jeon Do-yeon returns nearly twenty years after Secret Sunshine, the film in which Lee built scenes around her face instead of cutting around it. Oasis taught him to keep the camera at eye level and refuse the cathartic close-up, so that we sit with a desire across a class gap instead of judging it. Burning cut between a Paju farmhouse and a Gangnam apartment and made our suspicion of the rich man into the drama. Possible Love keeps that split between the factory and working-class home on one side and the bourgeois interior on the other. This time what crosses the line between them is a camera.
The early reviews haven't yet taken the film apart shot by shot, and nobody has said whether Ye-ji's footage looks different from the film around it. That gives you something to do while you watch. Lee is working for the first time with Kim Ji-yong, a cinematographer known for more stylised images, and with Jung Jaeil's score, in a body of work that has always leaned on silence. Watch whether you can tell where Ye-ji's images end and Lee's begin. If you can't, that blur is the film's argument.
There is one more frame around all of this. Netflix financed the film, a global streamer that decides every day whose stories reach the world, and it backed a film about a filmmaker deciding whose story gets told. Venice gave it the Silver Lion, as it gave one to Oasis in 2002. The film is too new to have descendants, but the question it poses will outlast it.
So watch it with one question running underneath. In each scene, ask who is holding the camera, and who is being asked to perform for it. Then notice how often the answer shifts while you're not looking.
Concepts in play
- the people are missing — Ye-ji has been trying to make a documentary about mass layoffs but cannot find a central subject until she settles on Mi-ok; a collective political reality with no figure who can stand for it
- free indirect discourse (political) — The diegetic documentary: Ye-ji's camera speaks for Mi-ok, and Lee's camera stands behind hers. This is a nested speaking-for inherited from A Single Spark's intellectual writing a labour martyr's life
- fabulation / legending — Ye-ji's shoots put one couple inside the other's frame and make performance and self-presentation part of the action; hidden desires surface in both households
- the gest — The worker presenting herself to a middle-class filmmaker's camera, where the posture of being filmed exposes the class relation between the two couples
- cinema of the body — Sul Kyung-gu's casting continues the Peppermint Candy method of one performer's body carrying the damage of Korean industrialisation, here in a household hit by layoffs