For most Western audiences, the renaissance in commercial cinema coming out of South Korea since the late-'90s has been primarily associated with genre films. While the actual output of the country's film industry has remained consistently diverse, the overshadowing fixation has remained consistently upon those works that not only reflect a preference for stylized aesthetics, but also use the thriller, horror, and science-fiction film to give expression to feelings of deep social alienation, mistrust of human nature, and a pessimistic view of political futures. It's no coincidence that the emergence of the "New Korean Cinema" coincided with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which precipitated the significant scaling back of national film productions by native media conglomerates, but also presented enhanced opportunities to young auteurs with a finesse for fiscally responsible production practices, as well as a vision for a more narratively and formally transgressive, internationally attractive kind of Korean movie.
In subsequent decades, South Korea has maintained its ascendency as an economic powerhouse, and its export potential has certainly diversified into more optimistic directions, such as the explosion in popularity of K-pop music groups among English-speaking teenagers. But as far as filmmaking goes, with Bong Joon-ho's Parasite becoming the first non-English film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, and with the tremendous success of the Netflix series Squid Game as further evidence, it's clear that just as relative prosperity under late capitalism has not translated to an abatement in a certain kind of pessimistic genre fiction coming out of Korea, it also has not led to much of a relaxation or diversification in terms of international interest or, indeed, obsession.
There is a rather prurient, even Orientalist quality to the Western spectator's affinity for these variously blackly comic or oppressively maudlin movies about Asian men and women being chewed up and spit out by their own complacent society of extensive commodification and ornamental prestige, subject to physical and psychological torments alike, sex and violence often presented as dysfunctionally codependent. Maybe the feeling of an apparent dearth in our own national media sufficiently addressing our own existential crises makes these sorts of films a convenient forum for projection, but one can't help but notice the conspicuous analogy between the way Korean pessimism is salivated over in the U.S. and the way people used to obsess over the stylistic and corporeal extremity of Japanese genre films. The difference is that, as far as Japanese cinema, the geek show appeal never got much farther than the usual cult and trash film circuits. With the New Korean Cinema, the morbid fascination is much more extensive and problematic. Once you've got an organization as cynical as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences certifying a foreign dramatic-thriller about class struggle as the year's obvious middlebrow crowdpleaser, you have to know that something very weird is going on. More importantly, it probably doesn't bode well for the potential of a new crop of Korean filmmakers to inherit the mantle of their Gen-X forebears and take a crack at a more generically diverse and grounded kind of cinema, before the bubble finally pops on a lucrative trend and the attentions of foreign audiences gravitate to wherever the next market of trendy morbidity emerges.
As far as the Un-Holy Trinity of New Korean Cinema directors - which also includes Bong and Kim Jee-woon - Park Chan-wook, who made his first big international splash when his neo-noir Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, has got to be the most overrated. Besides Bong, his name alone is practically synonymous with Korean cinema itself. But especially with the benefit of hindsight, and despite his consistently favorable critical reception with his vampire flick Thirst, his English-language debut Stoker (which was a kind of Gothic, campy riff on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt), and the Sarah Waters-inspired Victorian psychological-thriller The Handmaiden, his oeuvre increasingly comes off as rather superficial and tedious. To be fair, Park has never directed a bad movie, per se. But his significance as an artist is all too apparently confined to his talent for consummately engineering effective moments, whereas the sequence itself is inevitably bogged down by convoluted screenwriting and a formal approach that epitomizes what Susan Sontag once defined as the essence of "stylization," as opposed to style, in that his formal presentation of his subject matter is predisposed to calling attention to the form itself, rather than describing the subject as that which represents something beyond aesthetics. This alienating stylization continues to be evident in Park's latest film Decision to Leave, which premiered stateside this Thursday, having been acquired by the curated streaming platform Mubi.
Co-written with frequent collaborator Jeong Seo-kyeong, the film is a romantic-mystery starring Park Hae-il as Hae-jun, a married police detective whose investigation of the mysterious death of an elderly immigration official leads him to suspect, and then fall in love with, the victim's young Chinese wife Seo-rae (Tang Wei). A classic tale of crime and obsession if there ever was one, Decision to Leave is far from an exceptional story on its own. But it must be said that Park and Jeong have managed to inject at least some fresh blood into a rather stale formula. In particular, their characterization of Detective Hae-jun stands out from the fray of grizzled or hard-boiled noir anti-heroes, and thus makes for a much richer melodramatic foil to the similarly more subtle femme fatale in Seo-rae. Not merely clean-cut, Hae-jun is presented as a thoroughly moderate policeman and husband. He won't hesitate to get violent with a perp when absolutely necessary, but he takes more pride in his fastidiousness and care for his personal appearance than anything else. If he keeps long hours, it's not because he's feeding his addictions, but because he suffers from chronic insomnia, an inevitable product of his incessant concern with all those cases he's never resolved. If he's haunted by his failures, it is not to any glowering extent that is so historically typical of the brooding masculine noir figure. (Indeed, as it turns out, his insomnia may be more physiological than psychological after all.) And because his dysfunctions and eccentricities are themselves so unassuming, mundane, and identifiable, his fascination with Seo-rae ends up breaking the mold in terms of how their mutual attraction escalates to irrepressible desire. Seo-rae, in turn, is not presented as a terribly seductive, lascivious threat, one who wields power over the noir hero through the sheer protuberance of her demonic sexual presence. She too is rather unassuming, mundane, and identifiable in both her beauty and personal character.
In stark contrast to the carnally explicit Handmaiden, Park and Jeong's new project is very muted in terms of any erotic implications. This does not necessarily mean that it is a "sexless" movie, though Hae-jun and Seo-rae do not ever explicitly consummate. What it means is that Park and Jeong have really challenged themselves, and largely succeeded in crafting an atypical romantic-mystery that works practically as a romantic story, not merely a parable about repression and unchecked sexual desire. Decision to Leave is refreshing in that, despite its mystery trappings, it is for the most part only eccentric in terms of exploring how two lonely souls become drawn to each other for some ineffable reason. In as much as it clearly has one foot firmly planted in the usual terrain of Hitchcockian obsession, it gestures just as much to a more existential kind of love story, especially, in my mind, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.
For their own part, stars Park Hae-il and Tang Wei certainly have their work cut out for them. As the former's character slowly unravels from the combined stress of his own chronic illness and his conflicts of interest, he is given little room to explode with his emotions, largely suffering in reserved quietude. A particularly funny scene involves him chasing down the suspect in another murder case, only to begin almost spasmodically relating his own desperate feelings about his life like a cry for therapeutic help. Wei, on the other hand, must toe the line of a cynical femme fatale, but where the explicitness of her cynicism is never presented as the entire truth about her character, and there is always an equally present and earnest search for mutual affection. In this regard, both actors perform ably, and their bizarre chemistry effectively becomes the driving creative force of the film.
Unfortunately, insofar as Decision to Leave proves to be Park's best feature film in years, it also proves to be exemplary of his being his own worst enemy in terms of his own superficial aesthetic instincts. His and Jeong's screenplay is certainly imaginative in terms of challenging mystery and noir conventions, but the means by which Park chooses to portray Hae-jun's investigations and growing obsession with Seo-rae are distractingly cliche, such as when Hae-jun's spying on Seo-rae in her apartment transitions to Hae-jun being presented as literally in the same room, directly observing or imagining her behavior. And to the extent that Park's aesthetic choices are frequently hackneyed, they are also too showy for their own good. This becomes particularly evident during certain scene transitions that, true to Sontag's critique of stylization, only function as theoretically cool tricks of cutting and visual effects, but say absolutely nothing or distract from what even a simple scene transition itself should describe. An especially egregious example comes when Hae-jun is reinvestigating the scene of Seo-rae's husband's death, and the sunlight begins flickering in-and-out before Park cuts to the interior of Seo-rae's apartment where this flickering matches the flickering of the hallway light as it is turning on. These sorts of gimmicky aesthetic frills are utterly juvenile, and well beneath even the sensibilities of a filmmaker as consistently superficial as Park.
Under Park's crude, surface-oriented direction, a potentially great romantic-mystery is pulled apart from itself, the emotional weight or momentum from any individually effective scene of Park Hae-il and Tang Wei's performances never adequately sustained. What pervades the film is a hollow sense of affectation rather than affection. This has been a major hurdle of Park's films since his 1992 debut The Moon Is... The Sun's Dream, another pretentiously convoluted and surface-oriented romantic-thriller that the director would prefer that pretty much everyone forget, but which, with time, has proved all too premonitory in terms of the most alienating and boring aspects of his ongoing filmography. For a while, Decision to Leave seems to at least be relatively unencumbered by Park's similarly crude and juvenile obsession with layering a lot of twists into his narratives, but it isn't long at all before even that abstinence over self-indulgence breaks. Park continues to succeed as a filmmaker based on a reputation he largely earned on the crest of a long outdated wave of international cinema that got more than its due appreciation for the sake of its presumably transgressive novelty. Now, though, time has betrayed the excessively commercial and cynical mentality of what that cinema represented.
There is great potential in Park's artistry, but what's long overdue is the acknowledgment that that strength is not best suited to fiction features. The best project he's ever been involved with is unambiguously Bitter Sweet Seoul, a 2014 documentary commissioned by the Seoul Metropolitan Government consisting of footage crowd-sourced from hundreds of citizens, tourists, independent artists, photographers, and resident expats, and edited together by Park and his brother Chan-kyong. His superfluous style and preeminent fixation on the philosophical possibilities of aesthetics alone proves a perfect match for a much more lyrical and experimental kind of cinema, especially where his indulgences can be applied to a more grounded subject. If not a more grounded subject, then at least a more economic management in terms of time and content. Decision to Leave is fairly underwhelming, but Park's true masterpiece of the year, also co-written with his brother, is the short film Life is But a Dream. Though largely existing as a promotion of the iPhone 13 Pro on which the entire film was shot, Life is But a Dream proves a lively and flamboyant venture, effortlessly blending fantasy, romantic-comedy, martial arts extravaganza, and musical in a compact 22 minutes. It is a fitting irony that it is only when Park's work is at its most explicitly commercial - which is to say, as a literal "commercial" cinema - that it also at its least superficial.
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