CJ ENM
Detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) and femme fatale Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) in a scene from ‘Decision to Leave.’
Midway through Park Chan-wook’s latest film Decision to Leave, Inspector Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) makes his case. He explains in detail how Chinese immigrant Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) secretly tailed her abusive husband on a mountain climbing trip and waited for him to reach the summit. While he took in the view, unaware that he wasn’t alone, Seo-rae lunged forward and pushed her husband to the ground, covering up the murder as a suicide.
Hae-jun’s analysis is clear, his argument sound. To hear him tell it, there’s no doubt that Seo-rae murdered her husband. There’s just one problem: he makes his claims neither in a police station nor in a courthouse, but in Seo-rae’s apartment, where his statement takes on the quality of a confession of love.
“I was a proud policeman,” Hae-jun confesses, his trembling voice almost muffled by composer Jo Yeong-wook’s melancholy score. “But after going crazy for a woman, I ruined an investigation,” he begins, before pausing long enough for Park’s camera to zoom closer to his face. “Now I’m completely shattered.”
The scene’s South Korean setting might be unfamiliar to American viewers, but the scenario is not. Noir films, old and new, have long mined the idea of a once upright detective brought low by a femme fatale, an alluring woman whose involvement complicates a case. From classics such as The Big Heat and Vertigo to erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct, noir films clearly understand the corruption inherent in the most upright officer of the law. But as he’s done in movies such as Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and his English-language Hitchcock riff Stoker, Park mixes genres and tones to form surprising concoctions, making Decision to Leave into a powerful tale of police corruption.
Building up to Hae-jun’s confession, Park plays the events relatively straight. Hae-jun acts as a prototypical good detective, who spends his weeks doing police work in the big city of Busan and his weekends in the quiet hamlet Ipo, where he lives with his sensual and scientifically-minded wife Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun). With his ability to channel his chronic insomnia into ceaseless stakeouts, Hae-jun has developed a reputation for thoroughness in his department, commanding such respect that few initially notice when he devotes more time than necessary to investigating a powerful dead man’s pretty young widow.
While this mingling of crime and romance plots reveals the stern policeman to be a fundamentally fallible person, it also underscores the problems inherent in police work.
Even those new to Park’s work can sense a shift coming, as Hae-jun’s explanation of Seo-rae’s guilt comes too easily and too early, failing to account for events we viewers witnessed earlier in the movie. But where some might expect the movie to become even more of a heated thriller, Decision to Leave takes on a more languid tone, pushing to the fore the romantic longing implicit in the movie’s first half. The frenetic editing that marked the movie’s first hour gives way to longer shots and tighter holds on characters’ faces. Hands tentatively reach for each other, sorrow follows sudden memories, and partners notice their spouses’ strange behaviors.
As moving as these moments certainly are, Park never divorces them from the central police plot. Whatever else Hae-jun and Seo-rae may wish to be to one another, they remain, fundamentally, participants in a murder investigation. Seo-rae admits as much when, in her limited Korean, she asks to be Hae-jun’s “suspect,” someone he constantly watches.
While this mingling of crime and romance plots reveals the stern policeman to be a fundamentally fallible person, it also underscores the problems inherent in police work. Hae-jun begins the movie as a trusted investigator, someone whose powers of observation and keen mind make him an effective crime fighter. While apprehending a murderer in Busan, Hae-jun uses his wits to disarm the suspect, preventing the man’s suicide to bring him to justice. He even chastises his younger partner for threatening to beat the suspect, demanding that those under his command keep their integrity.
But even when showing an officer operating by the book, Decision to Leave reminds viewers of the vast power placed in the hands of fallible people. Throughout the movie, we follow Hae-jun on stakeouts, where he sits in his car and peers into Seo-rae’s apartment through binoculars, recording his thoughts on a smartwatch. These scenes begin with Seo-rae and Hae-jun separated by vast distances. Then they suddenly cut to a new composition, with the inspector standing in the suspect’s apartment, his voice distorted as he narrates her daily routine, unaware that she’s being surveilled.
Park uses a similar technique when visualizing flashbacks, as Seo-rae’s memories begin as cutaways to her younger self speaking with her mother in China or dealing with her husband. But as Hae-jun becomes enraptured by Seo-rae’s tale, he appears in the scene, watching the events as they are narrated to him. Likewise, when Hae-jun describes the past, even that of Seo-rae, he appears in the flashback as a secret observer. So when Hae-jun lays out his case against Seo-rae, describing the steps she took to kill her husband, he appears in the scene as well, watching what the character can only see in his mind’s eye.
To be sure, Park’s approach humanizes the characters, even the “proud policeman.” But with its heavy use of surveillance technology, the movie also insists that police have disproportionate power to enforce their will.
Beyond their elegance, scenes such as these remind viewers of the subjective nature of the stories we’re told. The standard flashback structure used by most filmmakers simply shows us events of the past, suggesting that we see them more or less as they actually happened. But when Hae-jun appears in the scene, we cannot escape his subjectivity. His presence reminds viewers that we see that past not as it was, but as it is understood by Hae-jun.
Ever the genre alchemist, Park refuses to play any aspect of the movie straight, taking advantage of the ambiguities in the characters’ perspectives and motivations. Hae-jun and Seo-rae may genuinely be falling for one another, or they may use each other for their own ends, or some combination of both. Buried in the sea of memory and manipulation, the truth remains inaccessible, least of all to the viewers.
To be sure, Park’s approach humanizes the characters, even the “proud policeman” Hae-jun. He is as just as susceptible as anyone else to feelings, misunderstandings, and lapses in judgment. But with its heavy use of surveillance technology, the movie also insists that police have disproportionate power to enforce their will, a will motivated by those same emotions.
As a romance story, Decision to Leave finds dignity in people shattered by their inability to understand their attraction to others. But as a noir film, Decision to Leave reminds us that, in a state of constant surveillance, proud policemen have the means to make their story the official story, regardless of its relationship to the truth.