Netflix dropped a new Lee Chang-dong drama today, “Possible Love,” and it lands squarely alongside another recent release, the documentary “You Can See Everything,” in raising the same uncomfortable question: can viewers actually trust the people behind the camera to tell the truth?
“Possible Love,” directed by Lee and co-written with Oh Jung-mi, is not itself a documentary. It’s a nearly three-hour fictional drama about one. Jeon Do-yeon plays Mi-ok, a working-class woman who befriends a documentary filmmaker named Lee Ye-ji, called “Director Lee” by everyone in the film, just as the real director is in life. Mi-ok agrees to take part in a documentary about laid-off auto plant workers.
Her husband, Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, was one of those workers, fired after a brutal union strike that ended with authorities beating and killing workers. Ho-seok survived; many of his fellow laid-off coworkers did not, taking their own lives. He’s since sunk into despair and alcohol. Director Lee decides he’s the ideal subject for her film.
Mi-ok, isolated and hungry for connection, is drawn in by Director Lee’s attention and by the wealth and charm of Lee’s husband, Sang-woo, played by Zo In-sung. The friendship has an odd rhythm: every time Mi-ok opens up, Director Lee produces a camera and asks her to say it again on film. Still, the dinners are nice, the invitations generous, and Mi-ok accepts a weekend at Sang-woo’s coastal second home. Ho-seok goes along, reluctantly.
For stretches, the friendship between Mi-ok and Director Lee looks real. They drink together, joke together, trade affectionate insults. Director Lee herself admits to her husband that she’s trying to love Mi-ok and Ho-seok for the sake of the documentary. The film’s answer to whether that calculation cheapens the love is a flat yes.
By the end, both Mi-ok and the audience see it clearly: Director Lee never treats Mi-ok as an equal. She turns the camera off when she wants to share something personal about herself, but when Mi-ok breaks down in the woods, raw and vulnerable, Director Lee hides among the trees and keeps filming. That’s not friendship. That’s extraction.
A different kind of manipulation
“You Can See Everything,” the documentary from Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, runs the question the other direction. It doesn’t ask whether the filmmaker is manipulating his subject through false affection — it asks whether the filmmaker got manipulated by his own real feelings for his subject, convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. Without spoiling it, the film deliberately leaves viewers unsure whether Fielder developed genuine feelings, platonic or otherwise, for Holmes.
That ambiguity rattled enough viewers that many went online afterward to ask whether the film could even be called a documentary at all.
Taken together, both projects puncture the assumption that documentary filmmakers are neutral third parties simply recording the truth. They’re not. They’re artists with their own agendas, blind spots, and ambitions, same as any other storyteller.
“You Can See Everything” is a documentary that deliberately undercuts confidence in its own narrator. “Possible Love” is a drama that asks audiences to think about the real people behind the sob stories that get mined for documentary footage. Neither film is trying to discredit the documentary genre outright — both are daring viewers to look harder at it.
A filmmaker can promise a subject real affection. A subject can promise a filmmaker real openness. Either way, it’s on the audience to decide how much of it to believe.
