Park Chan Wook
Decision to leave

In Park Chan-wook's cinema, stylistic refinement, aesthetic and allegorical nuances, and verbal sophistication go hand in hand, creating organic works that leave a profound mark on the soul and psyche. The power of words impacts the fabric of images with sublime lyrical and poetic results.

If it is true that Mr. Vengeance, the first chapter of the iconic and historic trilogy that popularized South Korean cinema worldwide, made the raw and devastating power of the image its focus over the use of words (much reduced, as in the works of the late Kim Ki-duk), from Old Boy in particular, this dual exploration has been at the center of Park's auteur discourse.
So many aphorisms are drawn from the 2005 masterpiece that citing just one would be reductive.

Decision to Leave, which is a poem already in the title, precisely reprises this type that Park has made his own, defining his works that are always very personal even when drawing from the history of cinema. From the endless source, the endless river of cinematography.
This latest film, in particular, returns to the Hitchcockian atmospheres already experimented in Stoker, the first and only international film by Park, which, however, was not written in the first person but directed on commission. The result was ultimately very commendable and classy, though far from the heights of Park as an auteur.

Decision to Leave is a reinterpretation of obsession, return, trauma, and the indelible sentiment of Hitchcock but in a guise that goes far beyond simple homage. Park indeed makes certain instances, situations, and recurrences entirely his own, transfiguring them according to his very original and personal poetic vision. And here we return to the starting point: the power of words.

"You have annihilated me"

Annihilate. Annihilation. Michel Houellebecq used this word to title his latest novel. Shoah means annihilation. This gives a sense of the extreme force of this term, which within the film assumes an important, precise, definitive meaning.

Park, as I said, takes care of words, researches them, caresses them, along with the shots, movements, recurring allegories (like that of the ants). Decision to Leave is therefore a film tied to words, even those not spoken but implicit, expressed indirectly, as if to represent the modesty of feelings and love. The love that can be born and flourish at different times, as it was for James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo, an asymmetrical love, which thus betrays the indispensable contemporaneity to fully experience something unrepeatable in the uniqueness that is inherent in every relationship.

And in this regard, another strong word that can be used is "disintegration," which is similar to annihilation in appearance but very different in reality: eliminating the integration between the parts containing the system. A relationship is like a system, extremely complex. And disintegration is exactly what happens at the moment that relationship ends, leaving behind inevitably a sensation of death in life, following the fall of that fragile and complex system.

Park thus paints a moving and different sentimental story, as is rarely seen today in times of aridity, new yet ancient. As only great cinema knows and can be. New and old at the same time. Timeless and spaceless. Suspended, between the real and the unreal, projection and dream, like great unfulfilled and unlived loves. Buried under the waters of eternity and pain.

A very special film.

"I was born to his kiss, died when he left me, lived as long as his love lived." In a Lonely Place, by Nicholas Ray