Possible faces
(Eol-gul-deul)

Kisun, who works in the administrative department of a high school, develops an interest in a football student, whom, he discovers, is burrowed in heavy silence. Hyejin, Kisun’s ex-girlfriend, quits her job to focus on the renovation of her mother’s small restaurant. Hyunsoo, through his job as a deliveryman, acts as a link between the characters. From the start, Possible Faces exposes a deceptive softness. The endlessly sombre sky should be perceived as a warning: our bodies and words encompass a much darker force than that we wish to reveal. The clever thinker, Lee Kang-hyun (The Color of Pain, FID 2011) opts for a narrative that reflects our daily life from a more complex point of view: from one day to the next, habit and the unpredictable join forces and the hidden meaning of sentences is suddenly more difficult to grasp. Possible Faces is a unsolvable riddle. Perhaps its hypnotic aspect is key: one after the other, our four characters seamlessly survive hardships, the severity of which is only disclosed by the loaded narrative. Toughened by society’s pliancy, they intuitively wear masks which they appropriately adapt to each moment of their lives. When watching Possible Faces, the spectator initially experiences a feeling of vertigo which then rapidly turns into a violent feeling of rage against a society that is numbed by its own horror. As a filmmaker and cartographer, Lee Kang-hyun uses various constructions to reveal the architecture of widespread surveillance in which floats hatred, the origin of which is unclear. The filmmaker resorts to the only weapon he has capable of revealing the underside of the story conveyed by the four characters: the very strudy architecture of his film. (VP)