Every now and then, a Korean movie gets Chinese netizens obsessed and starts heated discussions on Douban, a platform for Chinese movie, theater and other art form fans to share their thoughts. The latest buzz is on “Decision to Leave,” a dizzyingly complex drama from Park Chan-wook, starring Chinese actress Tang Wei alongside Park Hae-il.
The movie that won a best director award at this year’s Cannes for Park Chan-wook, famed for a fascination with sex and violence in his past works, retains the enigmatic superb use of visual language and camerawork, but becomes softened and restrained in presenting visuals that make the audience uneasy. The camera focuses on things never seen before, like an interrogation room mirror, or views from surveillance cameras, and the whole saga is edited as if Park can’t wait to show the audience what’s up his sleeve. A viewer’s short break to the bathroom may result in the loss of a clue and failure to follow the plotlines. But hidden behind the meticulous crime-solving game is an intoxicating story of love, manipulation and obsession between a cop and a female suspect.
The death of her first husband gets Seo-rae (Tang Wei) into acquaintance with sharp-minded, scrupulously tidy detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), whom she manipulates but gradually falls for.
Seo-rae is a Chinese immigrant who married a much older husband and works as a care nurse. She is totally calm, even caught on the camera with an elusive smile during the interrogations after her mountain-climbing husband fell to death in the wilderness of Busan. Did she push the abusive husband down the cliffs?
On the other hand, Hae-joon suffers from insomnia, in frequent need of eye drops — one of a wide selection of personal items he carries in suits tailored for his detective job, with 12 pockets in his jacket and six in his pants. During interrogation and while watching Seo-rae on stakeouts, he finds plenty of reasons to consider her a suspect. For one, she killed her mother back in China with fentanyl because she couldn’t leave the red-ridden old woman behind or take her along on her stowaway trip to South Korea.
However, a forged suicide note believed to have been left by the husband and Seo-rae’s alibi help wrap up the case as a suicide.
Developing a secret love for Seo-rae during his stakeouts and even imagining picking up cigarette ash for her while she dozes off watching a TV series, Hae-joon chooses to believe in her innocence until a detail unwittingly leaked by the old woman Seo-rae has been nursing reveals the truth to him. In a series of flashbacks, with Hae-joon present and watching, Seo-rae swaps her phone for the old woman’s, leaves the nursing home room through a rear window, rides a bus to the rocky hills where her husband fell to death, climbs up the peak (which is 138 floors high and recorded by the old woman’s phone), and pushes him off the cliffs.
Hae-joon, priding himself as a good detective, feels himself “crumbling” (in his own words) the moment he finds out the truth. Visiting Seo-rae again and telling her to switch her phone back before throwing it into the deep sea, he leaves.
Still thinking about Seo-rae from time to time, Hae-joon decides not to love her and transfers to a mist-enshrouded fishing town where his wife works for a nuclear plant. Then, there’s a second murder. This time it’s Seo-rae’s second husband, a stock investor running a Ponzi scheme and hiding away from his creditors.
Although evidence points to the fact that Seo-rae is not the murderer, and a creditor’s son already admits to his stabbing the victim, Hae-joon doubts Seo-rae’s innocence. He may be right to some extent, as Seo-rae allows the murderer to plant a tracker in her phone and kills his sick mother with fentanyl capsules; the man has threatened to kill her husband as soon as his mom, suffering a huge loss from the Ponzi scheme, dies. The man kills Seo-rae’s husband for her unknowingly.
Why does Seo-rae do it? She tells Hae-joon teasingly: “A decent man like you will not marry me. … It takes a murder to be near you again.” But the real reason could be that the second husband threatens to send a recording of Hae-joon’s conversation with her to his wife, and let the world know he helped her cover up the first murder.
The movie employs repeated images to cue the audience. Using a translation app in her phone, Seo-rae tells Hae-joon early in the film that she doesn’t love mountains, but oceans, quoting Confucius “A benevolent man loves mountains and a wise man loves waters.”
She is far from benevolent, but rather a beautiful yet enigmatic woman, unfathomable like the ocean. In contrast, Hae-joon is neat and upright, vowing to solve all his cases to avenge the victims. When these two fall in love, things become complicated and messy.
Towards the end of the movie, Seo-rae realizes that Hae-joon’s love for her is no longer there, and he cannot even remember he once expressed it. Drowned in deep sorrow and desperation, she digs a tomb in the sand by the ocean and allows the rising tides to bury her. This way, she will become an unsolved case that Hae-joon will always remember.
With superb story-telling techniques, enticing visuals and classic scoring, the film tells a sad romantic story about how love can be elusively difficult to grasp.
(The author is a Features Department editor of Shenzhen Daily.)