The Park Chan-wook interview: On ‘Decision to Leave’ and the art of making sensual cinema
The Hindu
South Korea’s legendary filmmaker Park Chan-wook discusses the thematic elements of his latest, ‘Decision to Leave’, which fetched him Best Director at Cannes Film Festival 2022
Detective Jang Hae-jun only sees his wife Jung-An during weekends. At work, they are made fun of for their “weekend marriage”. Hae-jun takes up the case of a dead person found at the foothills of a mountain he often climbs and uploads on his video channel. Sounds good so far? The dead person’s wife Song Seo-rae, an immigrant from China, is called for investigation. She is suspected of killing her husband. As the plot thickens, Hae-jun becomes dangerously close to the suspect and eventually falls in love with Seo-rae.
Think of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo (1958) — or even Rear Window (1954). Decision to Leave marks the return of South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook to direction six years after The Handmaiden (2016), if you discount the webseries, The Little Drummer Girl, he directed in 2018. Decision to Leave fetched Park the Best Director Award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, and is now South Korea’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film at the upcoming 95th Academy Awards.
The film is a classic detective story but also a classical romance. It gives the aura of a Hitchcockian movie; the starting point, however, was the work of another master — David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945). Decision to Leave is a beautiful marriage of the two genres; Park says the combination happened because he had two sources of inspiration. He wanted to make an investigative drama and yet, a romantic film based on the Korean pop song ‘The Mist’ (1967).
“These two ideas were separate in the beginning but I thought it would be nice if I can combine the two. But there were several reasons that made me feel I have made the right decision,” says Park, via a translator, over a video call from South Korea.
One was the love story between the detective and suspect. The other, was their romantic relationship that also entails suspicion between them, thus forming the base for tension.
“There are some moments when they either suspect each other or are being suspected. Not only does the tension rise two fold, I felt that it would rise five or six fold. In the end, I was sure that my decision was right because such amalgamation of genres bore a great fruit,” he says.
It is rather odd for the South Korean master, who has earned a notorious international reputation for exploring radical subjects, the highly stylised extreme violence, punctuated by graphic sexual encounters, to make a soft and restraint Decision to Leave, where his signature elements are rather invisible. Park agrees that it is his most mellow work. At the same time, he wants to emphasise that contrary to general perception, the filmmaker has only been making love stories.