'Decision to Leave': Park Chan-wook's dazzling 'amour fou'

With his incomparable intelligence and grace, Fernando Fernán-Gómez used to say that he had spent his life looking for what he had sucked at the movies as a young man: a

capable of destroying his life.

Much of classic film noir revolves around this archetype that Marlene Dietrich foreshadowed so well in

and that almost a century later miraculously is still alive.

, the latest film by Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook —director of essential films, such as

or

to understand the

in the South Korean film industry— is a

dazzling capable of moving with enormous virtuosity through a visual language that appeals to the codes of the 21st century, governed by its digital pirouettes and layers, without losing its roots in the tradition of classic film noir and its eternal stereotypes: a

from books and a detective capable of losing his temper, or whatever, for her.

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Chinese actress Tang Wei plays the mysterious widow and Park Hae-Il the man charged with investigating her husband's murder.

Two characters that serve Park to compose a

lifelong

combines humor with tragedy or sharp dialogues with Mahler's Viscontinian

to lead to a tremendous finale, of a crazy, gloomy and desperate romanticism, which elevates the final result to the highest.

Until reaching that indelible outcome, we have witnessed a display that honors the school to which it belongs, that of Hitchcock and some of its most outstanding students, from Brian de Palma to, above all, Pedro Almodóvar, and that justifies the award to the best direction at the last Cannes festival.

This is a film to savor with as much care as the dishes eaten by its two characters, sophisticated and brilliant in many of its staging decisions, and which elegantly introduces the effects of solitary confinement in times of sex and passion raised to the top. digital cloud.

Park introduces some fascinating threads such as the one that is established throughout the entire film through the interior of the eyes.

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The obsession with eyeballs is not capricious.

It is the organ that connects the viewer with the screen and Park Chan-wook reminds us of it, either through the inert eye of the victim or those of a dead fish in a market.

Eyeballs suffering from an inevitable visual fatigue that, like those of the detective who investigates the murder, always with his eye drops at hand, are the ultimate mirror of a film full of suspense, romanticism and fatality.

Decision to Leave

Directed by:

Park Chan-wook 

Intérpretes:

Tang Wei, Park Hae-Il, Park Yong-woo, Yoo Seung-mok.

Genre:

South Korea, 2022.

Duration:

130 minutes.

Premiere: January 20.

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