There’s a scene in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 horror masterpiece, Pulse, where a college student explains a computer program that causes white dots to float around a black screen. The dots that touch one another are destroyed, but as other dots move too far apart, they are drawn back towards one another. In that film, it’s a concise metaphor for the crippling sense of isolation and alienation stemming from our increasing reliance on technology. But it’s equally apt for describing the ambiguously sensual, gradually destructive relationship between the two leads in Park Chan-wook’s hyper-stylized neo-noir procedural, Decision to Leave, who, like those dots, are both perpetually drawn to and driven from one another.
The film follows the married, insomniac detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), whose lack of sleep leaves him frequently lumbering about in a somnambulistic state. He’s not the typically scrappy, tough, or even particularly resourceful noir hero. Rather, he’s a snappy dresser, who’s fastidious enough to always have a supply of wet wipes on hand, yet sensitive and careless enough to be all-too-susceptible to the coy emotional manipulations of the woman he’s investigating for murder. While he suspects Seo-Rae (Tang Wei), a Chinese immigrant with a somewhat dubious past, of pushing her husband to his death from the top of a remote mountain peak, he becomes intrigued by the specifics of her personal and professional routines. Inevitably, his fascination blossoms into full-blown obsession as he continues to track her every move, eventually discovering that the only time he can get a full night of sleep is when he’s in his car staking out her apartment.
Where Hae-jun is a twist on the traditional noir detective, Seo-Rae is a subversive take on the femme fatale. She’s duplicitous and calculating, yet she’s also vulnerable and finds herself inextricably drawn to Hae-Jun even when he’s able to resist her alluring charm and returns to actively interrogating her. Seo-Rae always remains something of an enigma, to both Hae-Jun and the audience, with her potential motives shrouded in mystery and her actions seeming to walk an imperceptible line between self-defense and self-serving. The cryptic nature of her behavior grows frustrating at times, but Tang Wei’s subtly forceful and beautifully calibrated performance keeps Seo-Rae as the kind of riddle that, like Hae-Jun, we continue to want to solve.
Seo-Rae’s impenetrability figures decisively into Park’s portrait of a conflicted and forbidden desire that’s driven primarily by the dogged pursuit of the unknown, or perhaps even unknowable. Meanwhile, the director’s typically labyrinthine narrative, complete with numerous hairpin turns, tends to obfuscate or complicate whatever is truly driving Seo-Rae’s actions. In the first half, in particular, Park leans into a flurry of ornate visual flourishes, including cuts and dissolves that abruptly jump time periods and locations with little immediate explanation and shots from the inside of everything from a cell phone to the eyeballs of a dead man and a fish. Frequent shifts in perspective continue to highlight the gulf between what Hae-jun observes and what may actually be going on, something which is further hammered home by the ever-presence of technology, which more often than not, serves to heighten the disconnect between them.
Indeed, text messages, voicemails, and audio recordings, sometimes auto-translated from Chinese to Korean, figure largely into the story and lead to various misunderstandings that prevent Hae-jun and Seo-Rae from physically consummating their tumultuous emotional affair. Especially early on, Park fragments the frame, particularly in various interrogation scenes with the duo, who even when in the same room, are shown on separate computer monitors, divided by one-way mirrors, or glimpsed through the video camera recording their conversation. The compositions are complex, often shifting and reconfiguring in interesting ways to create new meaning, yet there’s also a nagging fussiness to the ornate presentation that seems a bit over-committed to obscuring what’s actually happening—leaving the audience in the same bewildered state of mind that Hae-jun inhabits.
In a clear nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the film resets itself at the halfway mark, with Seo-Rae reappearing over a year later with a new hairstyle and color along with another husband. Park’s refusal to reveal much about Seo-Rae’s mysterious connection to a variety of violent Chinese men she becomes entangled with in this stretch, however, drains these scenes of much of their potential suspense and further prevents us from understanding or engaging with the anxieties she’s experiencing.
At this point, the narrative itself becomes even looser, with the newly introduced mystery behind the death of Seo-Rae’s second husband, who also dies in suspicious circumstances, being treated as something of an afterthought. Brief interludes that introduce other cases Hae-jun is working (such as one involving a turtle thief) feel like unnecessary digressions in a film that already has too many moving parts. When Decision to Leave homes in on the enigmatic, unorthodox connection that develops between Seo-Rae and Hae-jun, it’s as alluring as it is provocative. But Park’s hyper-maximalist style here muddies so many of the details and needlessly complicates what, at its core, is ultimately a fairly straightforward mystery. Its restless attempts at reconfiguring the murder mystery genre will likely draw comparisons to two films from his fellow South Korean auteurs — Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning — but Decision to Leave is a bit too gratuituously convoluted to reach the heights of those towering achievements.
Photo courtesy of MUBI
The post Decision to Leave appeared first on Spectrum Culture.