Park Chan-wook’s Decision To Leave is exasperating, banal and phoney

Imagine the dour insomniac detective played by Al Pacino in Insomniac chasing a female murder suspect whom he has become obsessed with.

Some such catastrophic consequences await fans of South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook in his latest work. Decision To Leave is a consciously abstruse work, creating more muddle than mystery after a Chinese woman in Busan Song Seo-rae (played by Tang Wei who is just not enigmatic enough and ends up looking like schemer rather than a diva) is suspected of murdering her much older husband.

Detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) who is assigned to crack the case (imagine Jack Nicholson with a fractured soul rather than nose) looks chronically obsessed with the suspect A large part of this opaque film is devoted to mapping Detective Hae-jun’s mind as he goes from dreams to reverie to delusion without punctuation marks. He is a date dreamer, imagining himself with Song Seo-rae on duty and in repose.

None of his dreams about Song Seo-rae are particularly erotic. This is another problem with the narrative: is Hae-jun’s obsession not about sex? There are indications everywhere that his daydreams and night-layers should be about sex: an estranged wife living in a remote town whom he sees once a week, workplace anxieties, etc.

So what is Hae-jun’s obsession with Song Seo-rae about? So far does the passion go that Hae-jun covers up all the evidence against Song Seo-rae. I am not giving away anything in the plot that I shouldn’t. From the start, it is crystal-clear in this foggy muddle mystery that the beautiful tragic murder suspect has more to her than meets the eye, and sigh.

Fed on Alfred Hitchcock’s enigmatic women and Brian de Palma’s steamy suspects (imagine an oriental Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct ), director Park Chan-wook has crafted an imposter of a film. Its preening and posturing and the zigzagging editing (Kim Sang-bum) will drive the non-auteur viewers insane with its fidgety antics.

Since much of what the sleepless hero sees is in his imagination, we are never sure where the narrative is heading, or what it means to tell us about a love that is swathed in lust. For a film about crime and passion, the storytelling is tragically bloodless and bland. Director Park Chan-wook focuses so intently on the atmosphere that the characters are left looking like puppets on a string that can snap anytime.

Decision To Leave (that’s what I’d have done had I been watching the film in a theatre) comes accompanied with loads of encomium, including an Oscar nomination for best international film and best director at the Cannes Film Festival.

Just goes to prove what the film tries so hard to say: don’t believe what others want you to believe.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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