NYFF 2022 Film Review: Decision to Leave
MURDER AND ROMANCE COLLIDE IN PARK CHAN-WOOK’S SWOONING, DEVASTATING DECISION TO LEAVE
“The closer you look, the harder you fall.” Park Chan-wook cross-pollinates a police procedural with a femme fatale romance and it’s every bit as good as you think it will be. Swirling around two lost souls navigating a web of murder, deceit, and desire to desperately cling to their perverse affair, Decision to Leave is a sensual puzzle box — and one of the year’s best films. Tang Wei is sensational. Minor spoilers ahead…
Friendships across enemy lines, a vampiric priest and a housewife, an estranged father and daughter, a sapphic affair in Japanese-occupied Korea; from Joint Security Area to The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook and his illustrious filmography have long pulled on the threads of illicit intimacy. Plumbing the hidden, obsidian depths of human desire, perhaps no other director has ever straddled the thin demarcation between beauty and perversion quite so deftly. Decision to Leave - the Korean filmmaker’s latest - fits right into his twisted oeuvre, perfectly marrying a police procedural with a devastating, femme fatale romance that aims to discombobulate. A film that is morbidly playful and dryly funny until it isn’t (Park sure knows how to dismantle his audience with swooning passion turned desolate tragedy), Decision to Leave hammers home that when it comes to matters of our dark hearts, there’s equal opportunity for both deliverance and ruin.
In Busan, ambitious insomniac Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is the youngest inspector of the city’s police force. His doting wife makes the pointed observation that he needs “murder and violence in order to be happy,” so it’s no surprise when a peculiar death at the foot of a mountain shows clear signs of foul play, Hae-jun’s blood begins pumping and his investigative hunger kicks in. The cadaver is a seasoned climber named Ki Do-soo, and suspicion immediately falls upon his enigma of a wife, Seo-rae (a tremendous, inscrutable Tang Wei), who isn’t exactly stricken with grief. “I worry when he does not come back from the mountain, thinking he might die at last.” Is it a veiled admission or a linguistic hiccup? “I’m Chinese, my Korean is insufficient,” she says, stifling a giggle played for the cameras.
“…Decision to Leave hammers home that when it comes to matters of our dark hearts, there’s equal opportunity for both deliverance and ruin.”
As Seo-rae peels back the layers of abuse suffered at the hands of her dead husband - legs covered in scratches and flesh branded with his initials - Hae-jun’s sympathy quickly blooms into an all-consuming infatuation. Torn asunder by a crime he isn’t interested in solving anymore, a home he doesn’t want to go back to, and a wife he doesn’t want to fuck, it isn’t before long that Hae-jun begins wooing Seo-rae with premium sushi boxes during their interrogations and staking out her apartment just to catch a glimpse of this widowed siren. Is she innocent victim or murdering temptress? Seo-rae, in turn, reciprocates her own twisted affection: She isn’t particularly concerned with the mounting evidence against her, but rather the performance as object of obsession and the worry that a handsome detective’s investigation might one day end.
At one point, Seo-rae waxes Confucian: “Wise people like water. Benevolent people like the mountains.” Her flat’s striking azure wallpaper, adorned with jagged peaks and valleys that can be construed as either rolling hillscapes or cresting waves, mirrors the sensual illusion at the center of Decision to Leave: a precarious romance that threatens to dissolve if you look away. For a Park Chan-wook film, it might seem relatively chaste - there’s barely even a kiss shared for the entire runtime - but the reservedness unearths a potent sexiness: every glance stolen, every touch a forbidden trespass. Hae-jun and Seo-rae are a match made in heaven, undone by the hells of their own making.
“For a Park Chan-wook film, it might seem relatively chaste…but the reservedness unearths a potent sexiness: every glance stolen, every touch a forbidden trespass.”
It’s quite easy to look at Decision to Leave and call it overly convoluted or messy, especially in the face of propulsive Park fare such as Oldboy or The Handmaiden, but its sprawling - and at times, absurd - construction is precisely the point. An escalating series of ridiculous turns as life support for a perverse affair, Decision to Leave is the cinematic personification of being down bad, and one of Park’s most controlled detonations. Every technical aspect informs Hae-jun as a man obsessed: the sweeping, baroque brass of Jo Yeong-wook’s score laces romance with foreboding, and Kim Ji-yung’s magnificently frenetic lensing - filling in for Park mainstay Chung Chung-hoon - delivers exuberant flourishes that will have cinematography nerds vibrating through walls, but not without purpose. Punchy digital zooms, old-school wipes, and delirious crossfades are just a sampling of Decision to Leave’s visual wonders, each one furthering the narrative’s forbidden spiral of yearning.
In the end, Decision to Leave is a stunning two-hander, but it’s Tang Wei who gives the performance of a lifetime, and perhaps my favorite performance of the year. Absolutely electric with an ineffable mystique, her Seo-rae - equal parts dangerous, manipulative, and soothing - enters the pantheon of femme fatales as an impenetrable paradox and a mesmerizing engine for the film’s illicit romance. She’s never more effective than in the film’s haymaker third act, which finally unearths the director’s unique brand of fucked-up lyricism. Crystallizing the meaning behind the film’s title, Decision to Leave concludes with a gutpunch that will leave you in shambles, proving that even with the nimblest of his features, Park Chan-wook can still devastate with mythic, debilitating poetry.
