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No comments on Decision to Leave yet? It's a stylish policier (enigmatic femme fatale enchants pursuing detective) that's not quite as good as the best Korean TV series in the same genre (such as Stranger), and not quite as good as that other recent Cannes-anointed Hitchcockian Korean thriller (Burning). Park parks his grand guignol tendencies out on the street until the climax, which makes for a solid, slick ride with fewer bumps than his earlier stuff, but also fewer scenic highlights.

I know that at least one member here is waiting on a better translation/set of subtitles before watching

I don't recall there being anything wrong with the official subs, or is this a stolen version?

It looks like it hits U.S. theaters next month

zedz wrote: Wed Sep 21, 2022 10:18 pm I don't recall there being anything wrong with the official subs, or is this a stolen version?

I believe that the only English subs out there are fan-created ones. I haven't checked it out yet but others have said that the subs are really good.

I haven't seen a Park Chan-Wook movie probably since Thirst, but I basically liked this movie––enough to make me go back and see what I've been missing over the last few years (including The Handmaiden and The Little Drummer Girl). And for me Tang Wei is the actress with perhaps the greatest potential in film today––someone with a supremely expressive face, who is willing to play less-than-sympathetic roles full-force, without demure or any sense of self-consciousness––I thought her performance here made a potentially very artificial-seeming role very natural and believable. I didn't see the other actors rising to that level, exactly, but I thought the film presented an intriguing scenario, and I admired how it blossomed into full-throated romance by the end.

That said, the film relies really, really heavily on film genre tropes to work––it especially counts on you having a sense of the noir femme fatale, the black widow trope, in order to appreciate what's going on in the picture, and I don't know how I feel about that in the end. The whole film seems to exist in genre-land, without much connecting it to the real world, or connecting it to anything outside of naked appreciation of cinema. It ends up making the film feel a little more like an exercise than it feels like a film with any artistic statements coming out of it. By the time the film finished I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what it was supposed to mean. The element of Tang Wei's character being the descendent of a national hero was intriguing, but it was just dropped right after it was introduced. Once the film evolves into its final, game-like form, it felt like the film had crawled up its own *sshole in a way––which is to say, I found the ending poignant, but totally artificial. I did not buy what I saw happening at the end. It felt like the conclusion of a story, but I felt the film had shed all attempt at plausibility in order to get there.

Spoiler

This lady Tang Wei plays just ends up being so ingeniously calculating, it seemed beyond real––beyond realistic for any person, in other words. Her murders, designed to draw the detective nearer to her, and then her suicide, which is premeditated to a perversely precise degree. It's dubious to me such a lively mind would decide that this suicide would be worthwhile, or necessary at this point. Did she simply run out of ideas to keep the detective close to her?

So I think the film demands you love film and film genre more than you love the experience of fiction, and its relationship to the world we actually live in, and I that demand is just a little suffocating to me.

None of that is new for Park Chan-Wook, a filmmaker who loves playing with genre. But I found that I could see the vengeance films, for all their heady stylization, as a sort of anthropological/philosophical treatise, taking the concept of revenge––a purportedly timeless human urge––and challenging it with the urbanity of our modern world. Does revenge have a role in modern society? The three Vengeance films query that notion, making different arguments to ultimately suggest that our modern world boasts too complex a social interrelation between us all for revenge to be a viable reaction to the iniquities of contemporary existence. That's an idea which reaches out of these films, which I can hold onto and turn around in my head after the films are over. But I didn't experience anything like that after seeing Decision to Leave. It seemed like a movie's movie, but I'm at a loss for something that might transcend the boundaries of the film and leave me with something to think about. Did I just miss it?

On the other hand, I really appreciated the film centering on this extraordinary woman––even if she didn't seem entirely real––whereas Burning came across to me with an annoying whiff of misogyny, which I thought came partly from the Murakami story and partly from the filmmakers themselves. I saw Decision to Leave as being ostensibly about a man coming to understand that the woman who loves him is so very far beyond him. He grows to worship her, in a way...but she is incandescent, and he can't quite be enough to save her––and for some reason, she can't seem to save herself. That said, besides the central relationship between the cop and the

Spoiler

pseudo-femme-fatale (about as "fatale" as Barbara Stanwyck in The File on Thelma Jordan)

, there isn't a lot to supplement this reading. Every other character in the movie serves this central story, and has no life extending beyond it; they are all

Spoiler

potential victims

or they exist to pull the detective off the hunt. There's actually more in common with Burning than I first reckoned; because Burning has in it a woman who is ultimately unknowable––though she becomes coded in the film as "victim" more than the author of her own fate––and Decision to Leave is even more pointedly about figuring out an ambiguous woman's motivations. But DTL doesn't leave this woman unknowable at the end. Her motives are understandable––she is just beyond our hero. She thinks faster, in a more complicated way. She feels more. And in a sense, the "good man" she tells her dead parents she has found is a sort of disappointment to her––someone who can't quite get on her wavelength; someone who realizes what she means always just a little too late. Burning actually reaches out into our real world in exactly the way Decision to Leave doesn't for me, but I did find I admired Decision to Leave's..."spirit," I guess is what I would call it. It's "drift." And I liked it more than Burning for that reason.

I also felt that I didn't understand the movie's drift in key ways. I didn't get the meaning of Tang Wei's character being "othered." I mean, as a femme fatale, yes, of course. But there were frequent references to her being Chinese as a sort of wedge between her and the other characters. At the end of the film there was the sense that, in introducing the detective to her dead parents, that Tang Wei's character was being a sort of filial Korean daughter––at least, that's the sense I got of it. And the idea that she's related to a Korean political hero seems meant to link her inextricably to Korean society. But I just didn't see what all that ended up meaning. I guess it helped the other characters to treat her like an outsider, so that they all end up encouraging the detective to steer clear of her, to just arrest her and get on with life. But I have the sense I'm either missing something substantial there, or that facet of the film is simply not terribly far developed.

So those are my thoughts on the film. They're a little bit scattered, because I basically liked the film, but then felt after seeing it that it wasn't really enough, in a way. This was an amplification of a feeling I had during the whole film, but the mis en scene was so swift, sure and bracing throughout that I didn't really pay attention to my misgivings until I tried to parse out what I thought I'd been watching, afterwards. Was it a great movie? I don't know. It didn't seem quite great. But I liked it.

yoloswegmaster wrote: Wed Sep 21, 2022 10:28 pm

zedz wrote: Wed Sep 21, 2022 10:18 pm I don't recall there being anything wrong with the official subs, or is this a stolen version?

I believe that the only English subs out there are fan-created ones. I haven't checked it out yet but others have said that the subs are really good.

No, the film is in international distribution with proper, official subtitles. It didn't screen in Toronto or Cannes in unsubbed Korean!

zedz wrote: Thu Sep 22, 2022 2:44 am

yoloswegmaster wrote: Wed Sep 21, 2022 10:28 pm

zedz wrote: Wed Sep 21, 2022 10:18 pm I don't recall there being anything wrong with the official subs, or is this a stolen version?

I believe that the only English subs out there are fan-created ones. I haven't checked it out yet but others have said that the subs are really good.

No, the film is in international distribution with proper, official subtitles. It didn't screen in Toronto or Cannes in unsubbed Korean!

Whoops, I thought you were had watched and were referring to the copy that's been available on the back channels for a while now.

I had high hopes for Decision to Leave, but despite some strong performances and the film looking beautiful, it mostly fell flat for me. The endless plotting that made The Handmaiden so fun never found an engaging rhythm here- I think in order to earn the sentiment this film tries to (and almost succeeds in) in its last act, the mystery elements have to involve the audience before sobering us to the core behind it all. That’s how The Handmaiden operated- first as an arousing Hitchcockian exercise, and then as an emotional surge of thematic catharsis. Since Park openly has little interest in his labyrinthine procedural, we’re continually distracted from the breadcrumbs leading us to the cheese by seeing them as breadcrumbs, and so neither the journey nor the prize provides effective stimulation. This is a long movie, but I kinda wish it was an hour longer, if only so that Park could dwell in his plot (or, rather, the enigmatic states of emotional lucidity and cognitive confusion within the mini-set pieces) more, and appropriately keep us invested there for long enough to rouse and inspire us from moment to moment.

I’m sure others will see a completely different movie of economic pacing that should be taught in film schools, but while there may be considerate restraint, it’s a bit too much for too little payoff. This is an extremely well-made movie that I found about as empty as feihong did, even if it’s begging to be seen as a creatively-constructed and potent love story embedded in a Russian doll of genre. The Handmaiden already did that so much better, and while repeating a formula can be immensely valuable in a vacuum regardless of being superfluous next to a former work, Park doesn’t pull that magic off here. It’s in that failure that I realized how fragile such a strategy is, and only feeds my esteem for Hitchcock and his formalist emulators.

Finally saw this thanks to the Mubi release. First observation, the Mubi UHD looked splendid even on our antique plasma (via a Sony UBP-X700). Second, the movie itself was often quite gorgeous-looking. Third, I never REALLY believed in the characters (or the story they inhabited). So much that happened seemed so arbitrary. I can't say I disliked it -- as I am glad to have seen it. But I have to agree that both the TV drama Stranger and LCD's Burning made a bigger impact on me.

This was possibly the highest demand screening at the NYFF without the benefit of being a high-profile opening, closing or centerpiece film, so even though Park's previous work generally left me cold, I was looking forward to this one. In the end, I was knocked out by Tang Wei, she delivered one of my favorite performances of the year, and I thought the ending deserved to be remembered as a defining film noir moment, but otherwise the rest was just fine without living up to my high expectations.

Yes -- Tang Wei offered the best performance. Second best was whoever played the pudgy assistant detective on Ipo Island. I really did not connect much with the police detective.