Decision to Leave

As the director's latest film Decision to Leave is released, the Korean auteur talks about shifting the focus from sex, and his obsession with obsession. October 20, 2022. TextAlex Denney. There's a certain kind of detective film that gives you a ...

When Seo-rae talks [about the time] “you told me that you loved me” towards the end of the film he says, “When did I say that?” and it’s frustrating because Hae-jun is the kind of person who thinks that people can only express one’s love towards one another when it’s done in words. Because of the time-jump editing there is a certain period of time that’s been omitted, and what happened during that period nobody knows. He always puts others before him, but if a person is just kind and good the character would be boring: Park Hae is a good person but he has a particular quirkiness to him, just in the way he imagines things. Park Chan-wook: Hae-jun plays by the book and that’s something his junior detective finds quite frustrating; he’s the kind of inflexible person who brings out that kind of reaction from others. When I had my first conversation with my co-writer [Jeong Seo-kyeong] on the film, I said, ‘This character has many pockets in his jacket, he is very kind-hearted, he’s clean, he’s courteous – you know, just imagine someone like Park Hae.’ So that was actually a reference point, he’s the image I had in mind for the character. It’s not really well known to the world but it’s another film I watched and became convinced that Tang Wei is Seo-rae.

DECISION TO LEAVE (15, 139 mins) Thriller/Romance/Action. Park Hae-il, Tang Wei, Go Kyung-pyo, Lee Jung-hyun, Yoo Seung-mok. Director: Park Chan-wook.

Occasionally, the form has been elevated to greatness by the likes of Hitchcock, Verhoeven and Fincher. Indeed, the film also has fun with 21st century cinema's over-reliance on digital technology as a storytelling vehicle. Park Hae-il, Tang Wei, Go Kyung-pyo, Lee Jung-hyun, Yoo Seung-mok.

Comparing Park Chan-wook to Alfred Hitchcock is much the same as contrasting Oasis with The Beatles. It's imitation, but if the results are pleasurable, ...

Lose concentration and you risk being left in the wake of a fast-paced procedural that’s a magnetic marriage of style and convention. But is Park Hae-Li’s Hae-joon up to the task, given his chronic insomnia? It’s that sugar daddy, who, in the film’s hypnotic opening, is found very mangled, and very dead, at the foot of a towering hoodoo. Most intriguing is Tang’s Seo-rae, a young Chinese refugee, who, by a stroke of great fortune, wins the heart of a much-older immigration official eager to bestow citizenship papers along with a wedding ring. So it is with Park’s sumptuously adorned “Decision to Leave,” a neo-noir love story so dizzying you’d swear you’re experiencing “Vertigo.” It’s imitation, but if the results are pleasurable, if not rewarding, who’s to complain?

Yes, an ingeniously kaleidoscopic surface, but is there anything here, in terms of motivation, to justify all the fuss?

Yes, an ingeniously kaleidoscopic surface, but is there anything here, in terms of motivation, to justify all the fuss? In the end he will search a beach as the light fails and waves crash. The oldest trick in the book, or at least in the movies, with examples including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Chinatown (1974), among many others. As nice a guy as Hae-joon may be — in her oddly apt thesaurus-like terminology Seo-rae describes him as “dignified” — he is nonetheless, like the woman’s two ill-fated, charmless husbands, an agent of a patriarchal system. At least when the suspect is Seo-rae, played by (Tang Wei) as a subtle beauty whose sad half-smile hides a mystery and other female stereotypes and who is a person of interest in the death of the mountain climber investigated at the beginning of the film. He is especially taken by her work as an aide to the elderly, which proves fortuitous when it provides her an alibi and establishes her innocence. He does this with such intense sympathy that he enters the scene he is spying on, taking on the role of an invisible comforter, like an angel in Wings of Desire (1987). (There’s no sex, not even a kiss, which heightens the erotic tension, as in Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love.) He notes her sadness, her poor diet, her efforts to improve her Korean by watching potboiler movies on TV. [City of Pirates](https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/raul-ruiz-80s) (1983), a shot somehow taken from the interior of a character’s mouth. The suspect in question, Seo-rae, is from China and has an imperfect and idiosyncratic command of the Korean language. And when Hae-joon settles into his favorite mode, that of the stakeout (holding binoculars, he resembles Stewart in Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window), he virtually enters into the scene he’s spying on. Investigating the death of a climber who fell to his death from a mountain, he feels compelled to rappel up to the top rather than take a helicopter in order to follow the dead man’s final path.