THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
At the turn of the fifties, Park Chan-wook, post-modern brawler of Korean cinema of the 2000s (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy…), has inflected his style towards more softness and subtlety with Miss (2016). Decision to Leave, film presented at Cannes in competition, prolongs the movement.
Thriller and melodrama come together in this new film with mannerist charm which, all other things being equal, seems to accommodate Vertigo (Cold sweat1958), by Alfred Hitchcock, precise psychoanalysis under the cover of thrillers, with the electrifying sweetness ofIn the Mood for Love (2000), of Wong Kar-wai.
Under the cold police investigation, therefore, as under the repentance of a cracked canvas, the world of desire enters into fusion. The track is signposted from the beginning of the film. The image of two cops at the shooting range, gloomily complaining about the calm on the crime front. The eldest, Hae-joon (played by Park Hae-il, discovered in France in the magnificent Memories of Murder (2003), by Bong Joon-ho), is a racy and brilliant cop, in full mastery of his profession and of himself. Conversely, his young deputy is a boiling hot element who contributes by his anger to the integration of a fine dose of humor in the film.
It is in the third sequence that things become clearer, with this scene of depressing conjugal domesticity during which Hae-joon dialogues with his neat little wife, who turns out to be a monster of hygiene and boredom (she advises to do the love once a week, to prevent hypertension…). All of this smacks of the end of marital life and smells strongly of something scorched. Scriptwriting chance takes care of the rest. A corpse – that of a retired official who fell from the top of a cliff he was climbing – and even more so his much younger, moderately grieving widow show up on Hae-joon’s Stations of the Cross.
Tang Wei, 42, is an actress of infernal beauty, who was discovered in 2007 at Ang Lee in “Lust, Caution”
This woman is called Seo-rae, she does not speak Korean perfectly, although the inspector points out that she speaks it better than him. Reality or compliment? It’s not us who will decide, but the eyes of the inspector speak for him, and it will be difficult for the spectator not to join him in front of the crazy charm that emerges from this person. For the foreign spectator, it must just be lacking in this extra sensuality that linguistic alterity can sometimes take on. We are already doing very well with the rest, in this case Tang Wei, 42, actress of great talent and infernal beauty, whom we discovered in 2007 at Ang Lee in Lust, Caution, in a torrid spy role that more or less ended her career, but that’s another story.
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