It is impossible to understand modern cinema without the imprint of Alfred Hitchcock. The Wizard of Suspense distinguished himself by building his own cinematographic syntax and giving a new expressive value to the seventh art. Like other masters of this art, his legacy has not only been institutionalized and has been assimilated by all kinds of spectators, but is also a compulsory subject of study for anyone who wants to dedicate himself to audiovisual storytelling, even beyond the genres traditionally linked. with Hitchcock’s filmography. Although he assures that he did not want to pay tribute to the teacher with his new film, Park Chan-wook demonstrates in Decision to Leave know extensively not only Hitchcorian grammar, but all its symbolic and expressive charge.
THE PLOT AS EXCUSE
One of the elements that make the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock so attractive today (and will continue to be so in the future) is the fact that their plots were mere disguises and what was truly relevant, where the filmmaker’s true interest lay, was in the subtext, that powerful symbolic charge that the characters hid and objects in movies.
Yes, one could make a linear and superficial reading of his films and we were satisfied with a well-made entertainment product (hence, until the arrival of Cahiers du Cinema, Hollywood saw him as a mere craftsman, director of commercial products); however, to get to the true richness, the true artistic sense of his films, it is necessary to scratch that surface and delve into the hidden meanings of everything.
Decision to Leave It can be summed up simply as an investigative thriller with a detective who is seduced by a murder suspect and where the mystery lies in being able to solve the crime, who committed it and why; however, that would be to diminish the true attractions of the film. Behind this detective plot, what we find is a captivating impossible love story, which places the two antagonistic characters at a level of intimacy that leads them to be unfaithful to themselves.
VOYEURISM
Throughout the entire film the protagonists scrutinize each other. Their respective gazes make up the staging of Park Chan-wook. There is a self-conscious game of spying and being spied on that starts from suspicion and turns into seduction.
The perspective of the gaze becomes a game of representation throughout the film, not only through the eyes of the two protagonists, but also through the elements that surround them and are witnesses (spies) of their relationship, the motives, the cameras or even a fish eye. Looking from a distance brings the characters closer, and Park Chan-wook he represents it by placing them on the same plane, providing this voyeurism with an emotional closeness that goes beyond the physical.
AUDIO MESSAGES
Like the image, the words of the characters are also elusive, whether in writing, but, above all, spoken. In this technological world, everything we say can be recorded and becomes a testimony even of what we want to hide. In the film there is a game with these elements that, like other aspects of the story, are torn between the detective plot and the love plot. The language barrier is part of the seduction game, those messages in Chinese from the protagonist, automatically translated into Korean, increase the feeling of intimacy between them.
PREDESTINED
During the film, Park Chan-wook It builds a fateful atmosphere that imprisons the two protagonists with the same harshness with which it separates them. Beyond their intentions and their value in the film, the characters are called to betray themselves for love, breaking the norms of the genre.
In this, the excellent work and the intense chemistry that exists between the two leading actors play a fundamental role, Tang Wei y Park Hae-Il. The upright detective and the femme fatale transcend their stereotype and become the protagonists of an inescapable tragedy foreshadowed by the image. The more the characters want to distance themselves, the closer they are placed in the shot, and the more they seek to be with each other, the further the plot places them.
ABSURD
One of the contradictions of the macguffin is its absurd, surreal character. Although its function is to provide plot support to the narrative, its level of arbitrariness makes the story itself fall into the absurd. The new Korean cinema has also been characterized by introducing a type of absurd humor in the films that clashes and contradicts the dramatic weight of the narrative.
In Decision to Leave, Park Chan-wook also pull this. The film is, at the same time, a police plot of hidden violence, an impossible love story, but it is also loaded with humor and absurd elements in the characters that gives a touch of surrealism to the film’s patina of reality. . The filmmaker manages to make both elements, humor and tragedy, coexist, even in the same scene, without canceling each other out.
PRIVACY
The way in which the director of the Vengeance Trilogy, recognized for his gruesome way of staging violence on screen, here shies away from any opportunity to offer a display of blood and viscera on screen, is striking, despite the fact that, in various moments, the plot itself justifies it. Nor are we facing a tape of passionate sexual sequences. The relationship between the two protagonists calls for contention and unresolved sexual conflict that, in a certain way, shackles the characters even more, unable to close the bond that has been created between them.
SYNTAX
All this is presented by the director with an extraordinary formal beauty. The staging is very significant, revealing the image, the camera movements, the perspectives, what the characters are silent about or that they themselves do not know. It is an emphatic staging in terms of the use of highly expressive shots, but at the same time underscores the emotional barriers that the characters place between themselves. There, photography also plays a fundamental role. Kim Ji-yongthe assembly of Kim Sang-beom and the music of Cho Young Wuk.
JUDGMENT
Con Decision to Leave, Park Chan-wook once again presents us with a film of great formal beauty, narrated with precision and care and supported by the excellent work of its two leading actors, Tang Wei y Park Hae-Il.
Although for the director’s followers his deviations from some of the characteristics of his previous filmography may shock, it is a film that links coherently with his cinematographic discourse and that represents an outstanding return to South Korea after six years that they separate her from The maid and his American adventure with the miniseries The Drum Girl.