San Diego Union-Tribune

OBSESSION AWAKENS IN KOREAN NOIR

PARK CHAN-WOOK’S DREAMLIKE FILM ‘DECISION TO LEAVE’ FOLLOWS AN INSOMNIAC DETECTIVE WHO BECOMES CAPTIVATED BY A MYSTERIOUS WIDOW

- BY LINDSEY BAHR Bahr writes for The Associated Press.

An insomniac detective falls for a beautiful suspect in a suspicious death he’s investigat­ing in “Decision to Leave.” This deceptivel­y simple premise is stretched over two beguiling hours in director Park Chan-wook’s homage to film noir and Alfred Hitchcock. It lulls the viewer, along with the protagonis­t, into a misty, dreamlike delirium until you’re not even certain of what’s right in front of your face.

Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is the detective in question, an elegant, stoic sort who works cases in Busan during the week and spends free weekends with his wife, Yoo Mi-ji (Jung Yi-seo), who lives hours away in Ipo. Even his weekend trips home don’t always happen — people don’t stop murdering because it’s the weekend, he explains, but for now the arrangemen­t seems to suit both. He doesn’t sleep anyway, so he might as well spend his many, many awake hours in the car.

But his world is soon to be upended by a new case involving a skilled climber who has been found dead at the bottom of a very peculiar mountain that looks like a very tall, narrow mushroom. And while this fallen climber might seem like a rather straightfo­rward case, it becomes less so once he gets a glimpse at the dead man’s beautiful widow, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), who is Chinese. Hae-joon is immediatel­y smitten.

Seo-rae is neither innocent victim nor straightfo­rward femme fatale. She doesn’t seem remotely upset that her husband, who is much older and who abused and branded her, is dead. She even wants to look at the pictures from the crime scene. She laughs at inappropri­ate moments, which she later explains happens when she’s unsure of her Korean, regularly eats ice cream for dinner and provides home care for grannies, who all love her, during the week.

And Hae-joon can’t get enough of her

either. He stakes out her apartment at night. He watches her at work with the grannies. And they have what might be considered a very strange “date,” in an interrogat­ion room in the police station with others watching through the one-way glass. The expensive takeout

sushi they consume is filmed so lovingly you half expect it to have its own credit at the end. But it’s clear that Hae-joon, who has just instructed his colleague to not spend too much on his own lunch, is making some very peculiar decisions for such a well-respected,

methodical detective.

Seo-rae also knows she’s being watched and seems to almost like it. Is this romantic? Manipulati­ve? Well, that may depend on the individual viewer, but it is intoxicati­ng in its own way.

But lest you think the “Oldboy” director has opted for sexless sentiment over shock, know that he still takes a certain amount of pleasure zooming in on the ants crawling over the deceased’s cloudy eye. It’s the first of many nods to obscured vision, from the mists snaking around the roads in Ipo to a pivotal conversati­on

atop a mountain in which one person is wearing a headlamp. And there is a fair amount of humor, too, in imperfect text conversati­ons and lost-intranslat­ion confusions, as well as from Hae-joon’s various profession­al partners, who seem to be in their own workplace comedy.

At times, the intricacie­s of the plot feel almost sadistical­ly confusing — especially after the case is “solved” and the film transition­s into a different phase. It almost demands a second viewing just to parse everything we come to learn about Seo-rae, as well as all the cinematic references, from “Vertigo” to Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.“

But the mystery of the murder is not really the point, is it? This is about an obsession, both all-encompassi­ng and impossible to rationaliz­e, that simply leaves everyone adrift and searching for eternity.

 ?? MUBI PHOTOS ?? Park Hae-il plays the stoic detective Hae-joon in “Decision to Leave,” directed and co-written by Park Chan-wook.
MUBI PHOTOS Park Hae-il plays the stoic detective Hae-joon in “Decision to Leave,” directed and co-written by Park Chan-wook.
 ?? ?? Tang Wei plays Seo-rae, whose husband has just died.
Tang Wei plays Seo-rae, whose husband has just died.

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