It’s ordinary, it’s extraordinary, it’s Perhaps Love

Director Cho Eun-ji and actor Ryu Seung-ryong on the NYAFF red carpet ahead of the North American premiere of their new film, Perhaps Love. Credit: Jo Yin.

In his latest role, Korean actor Ryu Seung-ryong graces the big screen in the family-and-friends dramedy of errors, Perhaps Love. Ryu, who starred in such blockbusters as Extreme Job (2019) and Miracle in Cell No. 7 (2013) appears loveable and relatable in his performance as Kim Hyun, a novelist juggling the pangs of an unsolvable case of writer’s block, a simmering intellectual and creative implosion coinciding with the explosion of entanglements within his familial, romantic, and professional life.

Kim Hyun comprises the heart of a constellation of characters who find themselves in the midst of an extraordinary web of interconnected relationships: there’s his son, Sung-kyung (Sung Yu-been), a hopeless high schooler romantic whose unexpected breakup seems to be the end of the world, but leads him to find kinship and eventually unrequited love with Jung-won (Lee You-young), the sweet yet lonely housewife living next door to his mom, the temperamental Mi-ae (Oh Na-ra), who’s found a new lover in Soon-mo (Kim Hee-won), an influential publishing executive – who also happens to be Kim Hyun’s best friend. Actor Mu Jin-sung rounds out the company in his first feature role as university student Yu Jin, an aspiring novelist whose talent and ambition inspires Kim Hyun – though Yu Jin’s romantic feelings complicate their collaboration.

Just writing the cast of characters feels like a whirlwind feat of condensation, though the bullet-pointed summary only skims the surface for the spectacular personalities that emerge throughout the film. It’s entirely fitting that Perhaps Love centers upon a writer and the trials and travails of the writing life as it spills over into real life. Director Cho Eun-ji animates Kim Na-deul’s highly literary script, a novelistic work proficiently coordinating such an intensely elastic network of stories that, for each character, resides perhaps just a little too close to home.

The demarcation between personal time, creative time, and family time becomes almost non-existent as worlds collide and enmesh; when the film reaches its most entertaining highs, there’s about this much breathing room for a quick sigh of relief before commotion starts up again.

The prismatic claustrophobia that unfurls itself in entertaining bouts of slapstick altercations grounds itself through Kim Hyun’s connection to Yu Jin. It’s their relationship that comprises the film’s resilient heartbeat, that colors the film’s greatest moments of sincerity. What begins as an artistic correspondence sprung from admiration slowly evolves into an emotional connection exceeding an easily abridged definition. This mentorship, friendship, relationship unfolds with an incredibly versatile dimensionality: while Kim Hyun and Yu Jin’s bond might not be romantic, it is absolutely based in trust, in honesty, and in a special, bare-faced authenticity that allows the two to be fully themselves. This ardent connection mirrors itself in the kind of love which links the entire cast, who are silly as well as vulnerable as they come to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, share in the difficulty of heartache, and grow together, at times faulting but ultimately supporting each other.

Love: a ubiquitous but often elusive substance, a simple word whose short length is an injustice to its profound impact. If nothing else, it is perhaps love that everyone can fall back on, a point of connection which all eventually long for and seek. It’s an essence that grants ordinary people extraordinary experiences, as described by Director Cho, who, in conversation with the legendary Ryu Seung-ryong, discussed the challenges and inspirations behind enlivening a bold story, and the characters within them, in a production eventually traveling from Korea to Lithuania, because, oh, side plot: Yu Jin and Kim Hyun might just find themselves in the Republic of Uzupis, an artist’s country that exists for one day a year on April 1st. In an interview with NYAFF writer Alexandra Bentzien, Cho and Ryu talk storytelling, writers, navigating character development, and, well – Perhaps Love.

INTERVIEW

NYAFF (Alexandra Bentzien): I feel this is very much a writer’s film. How did you arrive at the idea to tell a story about a writer?

Cho Eun-ji (Director, Perhaps Love): I actually revised the script. The original script was given to me as a project I would direct for. I wanted to direct this film because it’s a story about relationships, essentially, and a story about prejudices. I wanted to have a humorous take, though the film deals with heavy themes: I wanted it to come across as a not-too-serious film, because going heavy-handed with these kinds of serious films could actually be a prejudice in and of itself. Personally, I feel that having prejudice against someone is actually the scariest thing that could happen, because someone's life could be so negatively impacted. The relationships that this film goes through are in a sense not ordinary relationships. When you look at these people from far away they may not look like our everyday people, but when you come closer, they come across as very honest people, living honest lives, like you and me. That’s what I wanted to express through this film.

NYAFF: Ryu, your character, Kim Hyun, is at the center of all of these relationships. How did you understand your character as a unifying force among these different personalities?

Ryu Seung-ryong (lead actor, as Kim Hyun in Perhaps Love): You’re right, I think this character is connected to all of the people in this film, for example, with the son, his ex-wife, and his friends. He really is at the center of all of these relationships, but I think he’s symbolic of the many relationships that we have as human beings ourselves. We all have and build complex relationships in our lives, and he is a symbol of that in our life.

NYAFF: Your character is also a literary one. How did you yourself relate to that aspect of Kim Hyun?

RYU: I think I started building off of the novelists in Korea who I really admire and love. I think there are certain perceptions about novelists where they really agonize over their writing, they’re messy; but I think in a sense novelists have very “sexy brains” – 뇌섹남, that’s a phrase in Korea where we say someone is very smart, and that’s an attractive quality. So I really wanted to focus on that sexy element of the brain. (laughs) And I also conversed with the director to really fill out the emotional aspects of my character.

NYAFF: What did the process of character development look like in collaboration for both of you? What drew you into the character of Kim Hyun, and how did you begin understanding him?

CHO: Ryu himself already mentioned this, but I think there are certain preconceptions that come to mind when we think of a novelist. You think a novelist is someone who leads a poetic life and is somewhat in isolation, but for me, at least for this character of Kim Hyun, a lot of these prejudices have already been done away with. I didn’t think he was the type of stereotypical writer in the sense that, yes, as a writer, he may have been able to impact the lives of other people, but he himself is someone who is struggling to live out his own life. That was the quality that was most attractive to me, as a director.

NYAFF: Speaking of different kinds of life experiences, there’s many generations featured in this story: you have Kim Hyun, who’s kind of going through this mid-life crisis; he has a younger student, and he also has a young son. What interested you in the multi-generational aspects of this script?

CHO: Because every relationship is centered around the character of Kim Hyun, I really thought it was interesting that every generation is dealing with their own problems. For example, for the son of Kim Hyun, Sung-kyung, unrequited love is a problem for him. And then – it didn’t come across in the narrative as much – but for the woman who lives next door to Mi-ae, I think there’s a sense of loneliness and the struggles of being a housewife. For Kim Hyun, there’s the sense of having to provide for a family, and the responsibility and the pressure that accompanies that. For Mi-ae, his ex-wife, there’s problems that occur from having to survive as a single mom and having to muster up that strength in order to survive. I found all of these problems very interesting.

NYAFF: For both of you, were there any challenges to balancing these characters, their multiple storylines, and their backgrounds?

CHO: The thing that I had a bit of difficulty with was, because there are a lot of emotions that arise from these different kinds of relationships, I sometimes felt that it could be a little dangerous in terms of, if we didn’t find the right line of expression, the viewers would not be able to empathize with the characters.

RYU: The director and I actually talked a lot about the concept of love in these relationships. As we all know, love can never be a one-way street: it always has to go both ways, as a two-way street. Finding that balance in all of these relationships was something that we really had to consider. For example, in Sung-kyung’s relationship with the lady next door, and Kim Hyun’s relationship with Mi-ae, we really needed to find the right degree, and the right weight, to finesse the relationships together, because I do believe that love that is only one-way is actually a violence.

NYAFF: We’re out of time, but I will sneak in one last question – what was it like to film in Lithuania?

RYU: (In English) She was crying. The time was very short.

CHO: (laughs) Ryu really helped so much in the days leading up to the shoot in Lithuania. But because it was the last scene of the entire film, and we really had only two days to film it, I felt a lot of pressure to do well. Of course there were things that I would have liked to do better, but right now I’m so grateful because I leaned on a lot of help from the crew. Because we weren’t a big budget film, there were cases where we had to tweak the scene in Lithuania a little bit. Ryu was the one who really helped out with that.

This interview was conducted by Alexandra Bentzien, in conversation with Cho Eun-ji and Ryu Seung-ryong. Estelle Seunghyun Lee translated during the interview on July 26, 2022.