Park Chan-wook returns with a dizzying noir starring Park Hae-il and Tang Wei…
Filled with nods to Hitchcock, director Park Chan-wook returns with his first feature film since 2016’s The Handmaiden, a visually sumptuous romantic thriller about a detective who becomes dangerously obsessed with the prime suspect in a climbing incident. Selected to compete for Palme d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the film has already won accolades with him winning Best Director there, and has been chosen as the South Korean entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards. No doubt with hopes to repeat the success of Parasite.
Park Hae-il (Memories of Murder, The Fortress) plays detective Hae-jun, working in Busan and commuting back to his wife only at weekends, investigating the death of a seasoned climber. He finds the man’s widow, Chinese-born care home employee Seo-rae (Tang Wei, Lust, Caution, Finding Mr. Right) surprisingly sanguine about it, immediately raising suspicions about her. But as Hae-jun’s investigation veers towards effectively stalking, he quickly – surprisingly so for a seemingly happily married man – becomes totally infatuated with her. Is she guilty or innocent?
There’s a precedent here, of femme fatales from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity to Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct. But with its Vertigo-inducing scenes on cliffs and rooftops, Park’s main reference is obvious. Even if sometimes it feels like it’s trying too hard, particularly with the film’s two-part structure, as we see Hae-jun move to his wife’s more rural town after a fateful chase after a suspect. It’s notable that Hitchcock had little time for femme fatales. His women protagonists had more to fear from men, even Kim Novak’s dubious Judy Barton in Vertigo.
Park is no stranger to dangerous obsessions, you immediately think of Thirst, of Old Boy. In many respects, the film feels like a director doubling down on his own preoccupations and amplifying them. From visual inventiveness and beautiful production design to obsessions of his own with certain pieces of music – here Jung Hoon Hee’s 60s recording 안개 (Mist) – it’s nothing we haven’t seen or heard before from Park. The problem with Decision To Leave is he overlays various narrative devices with such gusto it makes a fairly simply plotted film at points needlessly difficult to follow. Sometimes it works, such as cutting the timeline to before and after an event on a rooftop. At others it doesn’t, like when that same technique is used on top of another device. Conversely repeated viewing might help the film.
The dizzying pace almost makes it feel like an Edgar Wright film. And maybe the comparison isn’t unwarranted. Park’s former collaborator, cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, recently shot Wright’s Last Night in Soho. Here Kim Ji-yong takes on that role. With a solid filmography including A Bittersweet Life, The Fortress and Hansel & Gretel, this still feels like the cinematographer very much being led by the director. And such obfuscating of the plot ends up feeling self-indulgent. Park co-wrote the script with regular collaborator Jeong Seo-kyeong (Lady Vengeance, The Handmaiden), and it’s hard not to imagine the visual ideas coming first.
The other big problem is the lack of passion between Hae-jun and Seo-rae for you to buy into his obsession. It’s one thing for Hae-jun and his wife’s sex life to be perfunctory, but the chasteness between him and Seo-rae hardly sets the screen alight. That might have worked in the 1950s, though with more building emotion, but now it makes it hard to buy so quickly into such obsessive desire. Park wants us to remember Tang in Lust, Caution, but without the effort of getting us there. That Lee Jung-hyun makes such an impression as Hae-jun’s boffin wife is more down to her own performance. Like various other aspects of the plot, she’s as neglected by director Park as she is by her husband. At one point, casual racism against Seo-rae sees her father’s history questioned, there’s an underlying notion that being Chinese automatically makes her guilty. That Seo-rae may have been the victim of domestic abuse from her husband is simply thrown into the stew, without making anything progressive from it. Characters and situations fall in and out of the film with little explanation, to the point that it wouldn’t be surprising if, like The Handmaiden, an extended cut appears – though whether that would an improvement or not?
Park’s humour is the films saving grace, which lifts this from being a dry exercise. His partner detectives in each region, played respectively by Go Kyung-pyo (Seven Years of Night, Coin Locker Girl) and Kim Shin-young (Midnight FM), both comedians, play both foil and moral compass to Park Hae-il process-driven detective. The film is enjoyable, but for those of us who have followed Park Chan-wook from the beginning it feels more like a greatest hits package on fast forward, and fairly hollow at that. If nothing else, there’s something off about former film critic Park making what is, to all intents and purposes, a tribute to a film often voted by critics as the greatest ever. Just like that Jack Black/Tenacious D song, this is a tribute, not the work itself.