DECISION TO LEAVE
Last week, I finally got the chance to watch DECISION TO LEAVE (trailer here), which director Park Chan-wook won the Best Director award for at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. It stars Hae il Park and Tang Wei, one of my favorite Chinese actresses. DECISION TO LEAVE is another thrilling film from Chan-wook, who’s known for THE VENGEANCE TRILOGY and films such as THIRST and THE HANDMAIDEN. A story filled with old-fashioned romantic fatalism and slow-burn mysteries, DECISION TO LEAVE follows a dedicated detective (Hae il Park) who’s investigating the death of a man who fell off a mountain, but finds himself developing feelings for the dead man’s mysterious wife (Tang Wei), who’s also a suspect in the case. Chan-wook masterfully depicts a seemingly impossible romance that pushes the detective to grapple between his dignity and burning desires, cutting between space and times with his at-times disorienting shots that capture the strange intimacies between the two—the watcher and the watched; the investigator and the suspected; the saved and the savior. The screening I went to at the Hammer Museum featured a Q&A with Jeong Seo-Gyeong, co-writer and longtime collaborator of Chan-wook. It was very fascinating to hear the development of the story from a female perspective, especially given the ending (no spoilers here!).
—Mimi Li, Development Coordinator
