Decision to Leave
Hae-Joon, a seasoned detective, investigates the suspicious death of a man on a mountaintop. Soon, he begins to suspect Seo-rae, the deceased's wife, while being unsettled by his attraction to her.
- Released:
- Runtime: 120 minutes
- Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance
- Stars: Tang Wei, Park Hae-il, Lee Jung-hyun, Park Yong-woo, Go Kyung-pyo, Jung Yi-seo, Lee Hak-joo, Jeong Ha-dam, Lee Yong-nyeo, Jung Young-sook, Kim Shin-young, Park Jeong-min, Yoo Teo, Go Min-si, Seo Hyun-woo, Yoo Seung-mok, Kim Do-yeon, Jeong So-ri, Shin An-jin, Cha Seo-won, Joo In-young, Choi Sun-ja, Jin Yong-uk, Choi Dae-hoon, Kim Mi-hwa, Kwak Eun-jin, Ahn Seong-bong, Kim Gook-jin, Kim Sang-hyun
- Director: Park Chan-wook
Comments
- keithhmessenger - 10 May 2024
Subtle, Intricate And, Ultimately, Moving
First up, I should say that South Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook's 2022 film is a quite astonishing piece of filmmaking. As a 'genre piece', I notice Decision to Leave has been badged as a (neo-)noir romantic mystery film, but Park's creation is about as far from Casablanca (the film that sprang to mind in that category) as it is possible to get! Not only does Decision to Leave's 140 minutes running time not exactly fly by, but as essentially a subtle, extended character piece (rather than a 'cliché-ridden noir plot piece' - not Casablanca, obviously!), Park places unusually ambitious (some might say convoluted) demands on its viewer, as alongside the film's 'plot' of Park Hae-il's world-weary cop, Jang Hae-jun, becoming emotionally entangled with Tang Wei's carer and chief murder suspect, Song Seo-rae, the film-maker gives us a whole host of enigma-inducing plot devices, including non-linearity, flashbacks, allusion, wrong-footing, inter-cutting, hallucinations, non-sequiturs and even (as a Chinese national) Song's habit of playing back (on her phone) Korean translations of her native Chinese thoughts! Given the film's running time and its (overall) glacial pace, such narrative discombobulation could (and, arguably, does) have the effect of being a tad gratuitous - an observation that would potentially be a major (rather than, in this viewer's opinion, a minor) flaw - were it not for the director's skill in gradually drawing us in more and more deeply to Hae-jun and Seo-rae's emotional turmoil.
It is the pairing (and slow-burn mutual obsession) of the Jang and Song characters that are undoubtedly at the heart of Park's film, but there are other things going on as well. Perhaps the most direct is the film's cross-cultural take on Hae-jun and Seo-rae's respective heritages, which 'come together', initially as Seo-rae reveals that her grandfather was a Manchurian independence fighter and, again, as the pair visit a Buddhist temple. Additionally, there is Seo-rae's societal position as young, foreign woman - three dimensions which Park is at pains to point out are the basis for Seo-rae's repeated mistreatment by the men in her life. In the end, though, it is the gradual morphing of Hae-jun and Seo-rae's take on their respective selves, particularly Hae-jun's view of Seo-rae as a potential crime suspect, inexorably changing to an obsessive object of desire that make Park's film unmissable. Acting-wise, outside of the film's main two protagonists, Lee Jung-hyun also impresses as Hae-jun's 'distant' wife, Jung-an, but it is Park Hae-il and Tang that turn in superb, emotionally subtle, turns. Tang Wei has, in my mind, assumed the position as another stellar female first-time (for me, at least) performance alongside the likes of Faye Wong (Chungking Express), Shu Qi (Millenium Mambo), and Lee Ji-eun (Broker). As it happens, I did see Tang Wei in Ang Lee's 2007 film, Lust, Caution but the actress clearly did not have the same impact for me in the earlier film!
A brief word on the film's music (by Jo Yeong-wook) which is sparse, but beautiful, throughout and which also features (personal favourite) excerpts from Mahler's 5th Symphony. As comparator films, for the film's slow-build approach, each of Lee Chang-dong's 2018 film Burning (the brilliance of whose ending is even surpassed by that of Decision to Leave) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's 2021 film Drive My Car sprang to mind. Certainly, Decision To Leave bears little resemblance (from what I can remember of the film-maker's earlier work) to Park's earlier Vengeance Trilogy or The Handmaiden. - EdgarST - 31 December 2023
Glossy execution, tired melodrama
Park Chan-wook's visual mastery is evident in «Decision to Leave,» a melodrama for which he was awarded Best Director at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. However, based on a trite romantic-crime story, it is a futile waste of energy. All the technological display of brilliant cinematography, editing and visual effects seemed too artificial to me for so little in dramaturgical terms. A labyrinthine and sometimes twisted and incomprehensible script to tell a story of fateful love and adultery, with superficial treatment of an issue as dramatic as clandestine migration, did not compensate me for the 138 minutes of my life invested in the product. I infinitely prefer the festive, musical and elegiac short about death made the same year by Park, «Life Is But a Dream.»
