Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022) (Patreon)

I had jotted some notes on this film back when I watched it, but they went missing from my desk. I mention this just to explain that I have owed Decision to Leave a full-length review for quite awhile, and I will undoubtedly rewatch it once the year-end crunch is over.

I will say that I had an interesting email exchange with Patreon subscriber / Asian cinema expert Shelly Kraicer, who quite disliked Decision. His take (and please correct me in the comments if I'm getting it wrong, Shelly) is that there is a strong popular wave of pronounced misogyny in Korean culture right now, along similar lines to the faux-intellectualized Mars/Venus nonsense of Jordan Peterson. With this in mind, Shelly took issue with Park's decision to tackle a film noir, with that genre's complex gender politics. In short, the seductive deceptions of Seo-rae (Tang Wei) stand a very good chance of being read within this framework, that women are inherently deceitful and should therefore be marginalized within public life.

To be honest, most of the reasons I was so taken with Decision are formal. As if compensating for a plot that becomes more and more byzantine as it goes along, Park adopts a number of visual techniques that emphasize opacity over clarity. The split-screen produced by the dual video feeds of Hae-jun's (Park Hae-il) first interrogation of Seo-rae introduced a layered mediation that instantly calls to mind classic Atom Egoyan. But more than this, it provides two observable perspectives on a single moment, complementary but irreconcilable. 

Park goes even further once Hae-jun begins staking out Seo-rae at her apartment. As we see her going about her business, he appears alongside her, narrating his observations and conjecturing about what they mean. Instead of simply departing from realism, Park collapses the diegetic world (Seo-rae's presence in her apartment) and a mostly speculative interior world (Hae-jun's inferences about what she's doing). Park handles this so deftly, using a gently gliding camera to articulate the two different "spaces," that it's no hyperbole to make comparisons to Renais or even Buñuel.

While it is certainly true that Seo-rae trades on her allure, and that her freedom depends on keeping Hae-jun beguiled, there's also a sadness to her character that, to my mind, short circuits any attempt to reduce her to a femme fatale. Since Decision first screened at Cannes, the go-to comparison for the film's central relationship has been Vertigo, and this is apposite in various ways. Like Madeleine / Judy, Seo-rae is forced to engage in deception as a means of survival, given that she is always trying to elude the grasp of men who seek to control her.

But it goes a bit deeper. Just as Scotty becomes obsessed not so much with Madeleine but with an image of her -- literally, in the Carlotta painting -- Hae-jun perceives Seo-rae as the biggest challenge of his crumbling career. All available evidence suggests that she is a double murderer, and she has confessed to euthanizing her own mother. But Hae-jun wants to go over the facts, time and time again, in order to see something that may not even be there: evidence that will exonerate her. When he has to face the truth, he is a broken man.

But Hae-jun, like Scotty, is a castrated dick, a detective who has engineered his own fatal blind spot. Park works overtime to remind us that the Seo-rae we and Hae-jun have access to is a construction. Some of it is intentional on her part, but other aspects are circumstantial. Her Chinese ethnicity, and the fact that she speaks halting, imperfect Korean, puts her words at a remove, materializing them as quoted text. She cannot produce spontaneous speech. Everything she says requires mental translation, and occasionally even this system breaks down and she must resort to an audio translation app.

At first I wasn't sure what to make of the conclusion of Decision to Leave. There seemed to be no concrete plot elements that demanded Seo-rae's final action. But considered as a problem of feminine objectification -- the inability to exist in a male-centered world as anything other than an image of oneself -- Park actually goes Hitchcock one better. As we know, a deranged man's fetish can and will extend beyond her material death. As if finally hitting upon the only solution, Seo-rae erases herself from the physical world altogether, leaving Hae-jun to forever search for the woman who was never there.