Arts & Events

Drector Park Chan-Wook rightly shares for DECISION TO LEAVE, his just-released homage to Hollywood film noir, with his art director Ryu Seomg-hee. ”We scout locations…sometimes a setting gives the idea for a scene”. Among many pleasures, the film offers a dazzling tour of Seoul’s staggered roofs and zigzag streets and its surrounding landscape, a lot like northern California: cold rocky coast with granite mountains close by. These make scaling cliffs a favorite pastime of the newly rich , and an opportunity for murder. Did the victim fall or was he pushed and if so why? These are the questions for one half of this detective story/love story. The other half asks ‘Will they or won’t they, if she turns out to be the killer?’  

‘She’ is Seo-rae, the widow and prime suspect played by Chinese actress Tang Wei, and ace police detective Hae-jun (Park Ha-il) falls hard for her–a trope inherited from THE MALTESE FALCON, starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, whose enigmatic half-smile Tang enchantingly outmatches. But where Bogart;’s impassive mug suggests hidden depths of hard-earned wisdom, Park mainly just looks blank, perhaps on account of his character’s insomnia and unhappy marriage—also tropes. Insomnia, Hae-jun tells his sidekicks, is the secret weapon that has made him king of the stakeout. Night and day he watches Seo-rae through windows, in some of many scenes that keep us lost, proving this is a movie of the 2020’s, not the 1940’s. Is what we’re seeing part of the story, or a memory of his? or hers? or somebody’s dream? We see the fatal fall through the victim’s eyes first, as the rock walls flash upwards, then through the murderer’s, as far below us the body tumbles down the cliff. Chase scenes turn into fantasy martial-arts ballets, When Seo-Rae morphed suddenly a brutalized gun moll in a red dress, I gave up trying to figure out whodunit and surrendered to the joys of the ride. 

But the ride gets long. In the end , which turns out not to be the end, police higher-ups declare the murder ujnsolved and close the case. In a ‘40’s movie the hero , dishonored, would quit the force in in disgust. Here the lovers part and move separately to a new town, where the whole sad affair starts over and the film finally ends, in a scene that makes spectacular use of beach and ocean. Too bad the creators didn’t find that setting before they ran out of story.