At the end of the year, our film critics offer you their favorite of 2022. First of three tickets.
I had a hard time choosing my cinema favourite, the 2022 vintage having been particularly rich. I came a hair’s breadth from setting my sights on Everything Everywhere All at Once (Everything everywhere all at once), Daniels, which I loved the first time and loved even more the second and third. I also gave five heartfelt stars to Little momby Céline Sciamma, and The Fabelmans (The Fabelmans), by Steven Spielberg, so selecting one of them would have made sense. Now, of all the movies I’ve seen this year, Decision to leaveby Park Chan-wook, is the one that stuck most deeply in my head and in my heart.
Images, lines and stories still haunt me: a consistency in Park Chan-wook’s cinema. Moreover, I confess that the long interview granted to me at TIFF by the South Korean filmmaker, one of my favorites, constitutes one of the highlights of my career.
Here, the director ofold boyof lady revenge and of Miss merges detective and sentimental dramas. The process is not new, but the way is. We follow an investigator, Hae-jun, who, while investigating a possible case of homicide disguised as suicide, falls in love with the main suspect: Seo-rae, the victim’s widow. A solitary Chinese immigrant, the young woman fascinates the insomniac and married policeman.
Interpretation, photography, music: everything is exquisite. And the achievement! No wonder the filmmaker left Cannes with the Best Director Award: the virtuoso sequences follow one another. The ones where, stashed in an unmarked car for surveillance purposes, Hae-jun projects himself into Seo-rae’s apartment in his thoughts, are brilliant.
We see the detective, present without being there, brooding over the house mistress with a melancholy eye. Except that Seo-rae is brilliant: does she suspect that Hae-jun is watching her from her car? Therefore, is the intimacy witnessed by Hae-jun — and the public — real, or is it a simulacrum hatched by the femme fatale?
Beginning at the foot of a steep peak, the film ends at the sea with a poignant tribute to The adventure, by Michelangelo Antonioni. In this regard, as in the majority of his films, Park Chan-wook brilliantly defies expectations by announcing a certain type of film to better, along the way, make an unexpected turn. This tipping point occurs, again in a recurring motif, through an enigmatic female character, as the filmmaker knows so well how to create them.
For the latter, Decision to leave represents an artistic pinnacle. No pun intended, this is one film that remains.