In Decision to Leave, Park Chan-wook Pulls Back

Decision to Leave. Photo: MUBI/YouTube

In the films of Park Chan-wook, form follows not function but emotion. The Korean director is known for his exuberantly stylized films, which contain startling (and often gorgeous) camera moves and compositions that work as outward correlatives for the characters’ inner lives. In his previous feature, The Handmaiden (2016), which might be his masterpiece, the intricate and interlocking sets reflected the characters’ multilayered duplicity, the sense that everyone in that film was creating a false reality for others to inhabit (not unlike the director himself). This is just one of many qualities that make Park one of the great artists of our time. He astounds you with his images, yes, but in your astonishment you also find yourself trapped inside the heads of his protagonists. He is, perhaps, the last great Expressionist.

Decision to Leave has been billed as something of a departure for the director, and that is partially correct. The new picture displays little of the graphic qualities that have earned Park the somewhat dismissive title of provocateur. That’s not to say that these elements are not there. The story, at least on paper, thrums with violence and desire; it’s just that it’s all been buried. An insomniac police detective, Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), is called to a scene: An aging climber has been found dead at the base of a cliff that he’d traversed many times. The man’s wife, a Chinese immigrant named Seo-rae (Tang Wei), doesn’t appear to demonstrate the requisite amount of grief, so suspicion starts to gather around her. The married Hae-jun, however, is immediately taken with this beautiful, mysterious woman, and his investigation soon becomes an obsessive surveillance with no goal in sight. He doesn’t want her to be guilty, and seems eager to prove that she’s not – but he also doesn’t want to drop the case and lose her.

There’s a lot more to the story, including an interesting mid-movie twist of sorts, but Park’s real interest here is, of course, the tangled, tender relationship that develops between Hae-jun and Seo-rae. And while Decision to Leave is nowhere near as florid as Park’s other films, the director finds an intriguing stylistic correlative for Hae-jun’s obsession by occasionally placing the two characters in the same room together even when they’re apart in the real world. From his car, Hae-jun watches Seo-rae in her apartment, but he imagines himself there with her, which is also how we see the scene. Phone conversations are played out in the same location. At one point, we see Hae-jun climbing the rock face where Seo-rae’s husband fell; we see her climbing as well. Is it an intercutting flashback, a projection, a dream, a nightmare? Is it, somehow, all of these things? Regardless, it’s a dizzying way to let us drift within the delirium of Hae-jun’s adoration of Seo-rae; we lose our sense of reality along with him.
On that level, the movie is not that much of a departure after all. Park still wants us to inhabit his characters’ psychological realities.

At least, that’s the idea. At times, Decision to Leave seems too stylistically clever for its own good. Park gets the disorientation of obsession right — but not, perhaps, the yearning, the solitude, the … actual obsession. Constantly seeing this man and this woman together, we don’t sense any absence or longing. A beautifully acted scene where Hae-jun and Seo-rae wander around a Buddhist temple and effectively confess their feelings for one another loses some of its power because we can’t really access the exhilaration of their togetherness. We might be watching the emotional high-point of a different movie.

The story feels disjointed as well, as if Park might be two steps ahead of himself. In committing to a more restrained approach, he’s forgotten that the film still needs to work on some basic level as a narrative experience and a character study. Supposedly a dogged investigator, Hae-jun mostly seems bewildered and exhausted, with the wide sleepless eyes of an insomniac which he regularly douses with drops. But the character never breaks free of his logline. Park has given him traits rather than dimensions. He has a ridiculous amount of pockets. He keeps a wall full of carefully arranged, grisly photos from open cases. He gets ill at the sight of blood. He is meticulous, always making sure not to touch anything at a crime scene with his bare fingers. It’s all quite symbolic — like a checklist of items from Hae-jun’s life that Seo-rae will surely (and somewhat schematically) transform.

Meanwhile, the investigation itself, the initial suspicion of murder as well as the later revelations that supposedly drive the film, turns on a series of dimes. The husband’s death looks like an open and shut case even if his wife doesn’t seem outwardly devastated by the loss. (She’s got a decent explanation for it, by the way.) In other words, Decision to Leave is fairly unconvincing as a procedural. Perhaps that’s a churlish or pointless criticism. Genre is not the film’s primary intent; like Vertigo, it wants to be mostly a mood piece. But Park takes enough care in the way he lays out the basics of the story that it’s clear he understands the policier is the armature around which he’s built this tale of obsession and forbidden love. And sadly, the armature is rickety this time around.

What we’re left with, ultimately, is a fragmentary and occasionally alienating journey that nevertheless provides some genuinely lovely sequences, not the least of which is a finale that’s so haunting it almost saves the entire picture.
Most of all, we’re left with Tang Wei’s beautiful performance. Appropriate to the film’s intentions, her Seo-rae is all undercurrents and contradictions. She’s outwardly obsequious, but playful underneath. Fragility and resolve dance across her face. She seems capable of both intense tenderness and intense cruelty. There isn’t much chemistry between her and Hae-jun, but maybe there doesn’t need to be. Watching the movie, it’s hard not to become a little captivated with her ourselves.