A 2022 Masterpiece: ‘Decision to Leave’ is About What We See and When We See It
The Eyes
Park Chan-wook’s playful, Hitchockian thriller is a film about eyes, reflections and obfuscations. There are the eyes of an obsessive detective named Hae-jun (played by Park Hae-il). We learn early on he’s an insomniac so he rarely shuts them. During much of Decision to Leave’s first hour, he surveils a suspect in a murder case, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei). Her husband is dead, having falling off a cliff. Was it suicide? An accident? Or was he pushed?
Seo-rae doesn’t behave like a typical widow. She does not seem to have much affection for her late husband. We learn he was abusive towards her. This raises suspicions. Most suspicious is Soo-wan — Hae-jun’s ambitious, tenacious though loyal and well-intentioned partner and protégé.
Soo-wan is younger and quick to judge while Hae-jun is older, more meticulous and more empathetic. He is resolved to better understand the widow Seo-rae before jumping to conclusions.
She’s Chinese, he notes — not Korean — and she speaks in peculiar, foreign way to Korean ears. Some of her word choices surprise the detectives (and it’s clear American audiences who do not understand Korean are missing out on some of the nuance Park is after. Prejudice towards outsiders is just one of the themes this thematically rich film explores).
And so it goes. Hae-jun watches her through binoculars during stakeouts outside her apartment; he watches her through the two-way mirrors of the Busan police station where he works; he examines every crevice of her face during interrogation.
She is an enigma and he is captivated, but guarded. Somewhere along the line, however, he watches her feed a stray cat or eat ice-cream for dinner, not simply because it’s his duty to engage in surveillance but because there isn’t anything in the world he’d rather do.
There are brilliant cuts and transitions where Park Chan-wook communicates Hae-jun’s increasingly irregular investigation of Song. In one scene, he sits in his car across the street from her apartment, watching her through binoculars. Park cuts to his point-of-view, so we too are watching Seo-rae. Then he pulls a reversal, cutting to a close up where we face Hae-jun as he looks through his binoculars before lowering them and exposing his face. Then the camera pulls back, and we realize he isn’t in his car anymore, but in her apartment. The binoculars are gone. He’s not really in her apartment, of course. But it’s clear his surveillance has become something more intimate, blurring the lines into a voyeurism that transcends his duty as well as space.
Song watches Hae-jun too. She is equally methodical and in many ways even more observant than her suspicious counterpart. She doesn’t need to look directly at him to know when he is staring at her, and she doesn’t need him to tell her in which pocket he keeps his ChapStick. Is she falling in love with him too?
Hae-jun has a “weekend marriage” with his wife Jeong-ahn (a sharp-eyed, spirited Lee Jung-hyun). He lives and works in Busan. She lives and works in Ipo, where every morning one is greeted with a heavy mist. Jeong-ahn seems more invested in their relationship than Hae-jun. Yet it’s clear that long before he met Song, he was always more invested in his work, spending more time looking into the lifeless eyes of his victims than he does his own wife.
There are many closeups of the eyes of dead bodies in Decision to Leave (in one darkly comic shot, Park employs the point-of-view of a dead body’s eyes — riddled with ants. We watch through dead retinas as giant ants crawl over the lens). In his own apartment, Hae-jun adorns a wall with crime scene photos from unsolved cases and their murder victims. Clearly, the insomnia he suffers is in part due to his obsession over some fact, something in his collage of photos that he may have missed in his various investigations. The photos represent something he is missing and struggling to understand and he is haunted by them.
Reflections
The image above is my favorite shot in the film. It starts out with both Seo-rae and Hae-jun in perfect focus in the foreground. Then Hae-jun on the right begins to blur while his mirror image in the background becomes more clear. As their conversation continues, the shot shifts. In the left foreground, she becomes blurred and he refocuses in the foreground (as their background images shift accordingly). The shot shifts again. Her foreground comes into focus, his blurs. His background comes into focus, hers blurs. In many ways, this shot tells the story of the entire movie.
The scene, on the surface, is an interrogation scene but it plays closer to a first date. Song Seo-rae appears in interrogation room mirrors, in CCTV security footage, in cell phone photos and interogation recordings. A number of times her image is in multiple places within the same shot. She feeds her fish and she’s reflected in a pair of geometric glass. In one scene, Hae-jun is sandwiched between a monitor behind him with her image and her actual person in front. It is clear Park is setting Song up as someone we cannot entirely trust because she is a multi-faceted character armed with secrets, agendas and contradictions.
Obfuscations
Park Chan-wook is one of my very favorite filmmakers. And I think this is a good time to point out that Decision to Leave is him operating in a more subtle and reserved mode. He’s made a career out of films with extreme violence (Old Boy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Thirst) and has on his considerable resume one of the most mouth-watering— and more sexually explicit — thrillers of the last 10 years (The Handmaiden).
Decision to Leave is neither of those things, but do not mistake this for a filmmaker losing his edge. Park is just after something a touch more subdued here romantically (the romance here is more In The Mood for Love than Thirst) and a little more sophisticated, less blood thirsty (compared to, well, Thirst). And Park, spoke about this scaling back last year:
“This is one of the reasons I reduced the elements of nudity and violence in this film,” he tells Polygon. “In my opinion, most of my prior works have also been romance films, films about love. But people haven’t been able to take it in that way. I think because the nudity and violence was so explicit, so in their face, that that’s all they remember when they walk out of the theater.”
If depictions of sex and extreme violence were obscuring audiences from appreciating the love stories he was telling in previous efforts, the melancholy longing of his latest film shouldn’t muddy the water much either. This is a deeply romantic film, that much is clear.
How the romance is playing out at any given time, however, may be less clear upon first viewing. Much like Hae-jun’s investigation, the narrative in Decision to Leave is dense and designed to keep you off balance (it certainly kept me off balance). The more I’ve revisited the film, the more effective the humor played and the more I felt the emotional complexity of the film. It was hard for me to see let alone absorb all the angles on first watch.
Just how clearly is Hae-jun seeing? When he visits a crime scene, we often see him break out his eye drops. Park plants little hints that our hero’s vision cannot be trusted. There is one clever set up where Hae-jun is certain Seo-rae is wearing a green dress only to be told with certainty it was blue. If Hae-jun cannot see with clarity, he cannot think with clarity.
The mist is essentially a third character in the film (there is even a melancholy Korean song called “The Mist” that features prominently in the film). Much of the last hour takes place under those blankets of mist in Ipo. At various points both Hae-jun and Seo-rae cannot see each other with real clarity. They cannot fully trust each other or themselves. But what is more responsible for these obstructions? Love? Or suspicion?
I will continue to return to this movie because of how rich and well-considered the story telling is. On initial viewing you may think this is a toned down version of Park visually, but Decision to Leave has a number of brilliant shots and transitions. His use of patterns and visual motifs are as vital as in any of his films and you could surely conduct a thematic analysis on the way colors are used (if Cut is his most “blue film”, this is his most turquoise).
The most rewarding aspect about returning to this film was being able to more fully appreciate Tang Wei’s amazing performance. This is a sensual thriller. Although there is plenty of talk about sex (and impotence), there isn’t much sex in the movie. Though there is a lot of romantic longing. Wei’s enigmatic character reminds me of a composite of Sharon Stone’s in Basic Instinct, Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener. She is dangerous, manipulative and can be icy — but we still wonder if she longs for something… or someone. Unpacking the mystery of her intent is the joy — and the heartbreak — of experiencing Decision to Leave.
Yes, this may be Park Chan-wook scaled back — and it isn’t my favorite dark romance he’s made (that remains his sensual, sanguinary vampire drama, Thirst), but he remains one of our most mischievous and subversive filmmakers. By the time the credits roll, he leaves his audience with one last devastating punchline as impossibly romantic as it is psychologically torturous. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
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