A deeply absorbing 'Possible Love'

Korean director Lee Chang-dong isn’t in a hurry nor is he eager to clobber an audience with heavy-handed plot points. Instead, Lee (Burning) unwinds a story slowly, all the while deepening our understanding of his characters. In Lee's hands, the ordinary can become revealing. In Possible Love, Lee introduces us to two couples -- one, working class, the other, affluent. He brings them together with a provocative twist: Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) wants to make a documentary that focuses on working-class life, a group to which she no longer belongs thanks to her marriage to a successful financier (Zo In-sung). Yi-ji focuses on Mi-ok (a terrific Jeon Do-yeon) and her husband (Sul Kyung-gu), a couple deeply impacted by the strike that cost the husband his job and put the family under terrible economic duress. Possible Love deals with class and the decline of the industrial economy. But Lee is too smart and nuanced to make a political screed or to turn his characters into working-class heroes.…