Heojil gyeolsim
Park Chan-wook (2022)
You need to concentrate for every one of Decision to Leave’s 138 minutes: the effort feels more than worthwhile though the film is often puzzling. Park Chan-wook’s romantic mystery story, set in present-day South Korea, is among the most impressive screen dramas I’ve seen over the last year or two. It’s also one of the hardest to write about in a way that does justice to its singularity. This will be quite a short note.
Hae-Jun (Park Hae-il), a detective in Busan, is a very good runner (he outsprints a younger colleague in an early chase sequence) and a very bad sleeper. His wife, Jung-An (Lee Jun-hyung), is employed at a nuclear power plant and resident in Ipo. They see each other only at weekends, during which Jung-An likes to quote percentages, gleaned from a work colleague, of marriage survival rates for couples like her and Hae-Jun. When the dead body of a retired immigration worker is discovered at the foot of a mountain that he’d climbed several times before, Hae-Jun interviews the man’s much younger widow, Seo-Rae (Tang Wei). A Chinese immigrant who works in a Busan care home for the elderly, Seo-Rae is far from grief-stricken. For this and other reasons, Hae-Jun suspects she may be responsible for her husband’s death. He embarks on nightly stakeouts – no hardship for an insomniac – outside her apartment building. He also develops an obsession with Seo-Rae and imagines himself inside the place.
Hae-Jun’s investigations lead him to conclude that the mountaineer committed suicide but he later discovers evidence in the unlikeliest of places – at the care home, on the mobile phone of an old woman with advanced dementia – that incriminates Seo-Rae. Hae-Jun is, as he tells her, ‘shattered’ by this discovery and the consequences of his infatuation with her. The action then moves forward thirteen months (Park and his co-writer, Jeong Seo-kyeong, are precise!) and from Busan to Ipo, where Hae-Jun has moved to live with his wife. They’re shopping in the fish market when he bumps into Seo-Rae, newly remarried, to Ho-Shin (Park Yong-woo), a wealthy businessman. The next day, Ho-Shin is found dead in his swimming pool and another criminal investigation begins. It’s not long before a man (Seo Hyun-woo), another Chinese immigrant, confesses to this killing. As before, it’s not as simple as that.
I won’t go much further in terms of plot synopsis – and not only because the narrative is exceptionally involved: revealing too many details really is liable, in this case, to spoil enjoyment of the film. Decision to Leave won Park Chan-wook the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes festival and has been critically very well received, with a current 94% fresh rating (from 186 reviews) on Rotten Tomatoes. The few dissenters complain that the storyline is confusing and unnecessarily complicated but disorienting the viewer and labyrinthine plotting are surely crucial to the enterprise. When I read that kind of remark in a review of a film whose convolutions I’ve found vexing, it tends to annoy me all the more – but the vexation has often been induced by what feels like self-satisfied cleverness on the part of the director – and that’s not what comes through in Decision to Leave. Loose use of the label ‘noir‘ is another, well, bête noire of mine and plenty of critics have applied it in this case. I don’t have a problem with that either. Park’s film struck me as an unusually probing treatment of noir tropes.
For example, a male sleuth and a femme fatale are obviously a familiar noir pairing but Park’s intertwining of Hae-Jun’s attempts to solve the crimes in which Seo-Rae may be involved and the mystery of who she is, has extraordinary synergy. Her nationality and uncertain command of Korean, which she’s apparently trying to teach herself, are just one element of why it’s hard for Hae-Jun to get close to her. Despite the powerful mutual attraction between them, their relationship is almost comically chaste. They go on a date to a Buddhist temple and spend time in each other’s homes; Jung-An suspects her husband is having an affair with Seo-Rae and eventually leaves him for Lee June (Teo Yoo), that office colleague with all the stats. Yet Hae-Jun’s only bedroom scene is with his wife. His closest physical encounter with Seo-Rae occurs late on in the film. An embrace and a passionate kiss are the climax to a showdown between them on the edge of the same mountain where their story in effect began.
The mountain sequences, thanks to a combination of the sheer drops and amazing overhead shots by Park’s cinematographer, Kim Yi-jong, aren’t the film’s only dizzying feature. Kim Sang-Beom’s editing is essential to the disorienting approach. Although this isn’t reflected in the externals of costume and hair colour, the female protagonist’s identity is somehow no more stable than that of the Kim Novak figure(s) in Vertigo (1958). Although the male protagonist isn’t acrophobic in the manner of James Stewart’s Scottie, Hae-Jun seems to lack a head for emotional heights – this decent man is psychologically fragile. The Hollywood echoes are too subtle, though, and Park’s film-making too individual, to turn Decision to Leave into a Hitchcock hommage. Those Vertigo connections are part of a richer texture (rather as the soundtrack includes both European classical and more contemporary Korean music, including Jo Yeong-wook’s original score).
The lead performances are superbly complementary. Park Hae-il’s Hae-Jun is, as Park Chan-wook has said in interview he wanted him to be, ‘gentle, quiet, clean, polite and kind’ – characteristics that make the detective’s increasing exhaustion and despair more poignant. Tang Wei’s Seo-Rae has unarguable allure but deceptively soft features; she also proves to be a temptress who’s vulnerable. The film’s closing scenes, which take place on a seashore rather than a mountaintop, still take you by surprise. You know from a long way out you won’t guess the ending. You don’t expect, from such an ingenious film, the tragic heft that Park Chan-wook finally achieves. Decision to Leave is brilliantly confounding to the last.
27 October 2022
