Dispatched to the site of an apparent suicide, Hae-jun, an insomniac detective, quickly concludes to a disguised homicide. His opinion is confirmed from his first meeting with the dead man’s widow, Seo-rae, a strange young woman for whom he becomes curious, then passionate, even though he is married. A Chinese immigrant, Seo-rae feels left out of South Korean society. However, in Decision to leave, by Park Chan-wook, Prize for Best Director at Cannes, the characters, like the situations, are misleading. What the filmmaker readily agrees with, with whom we were able to discuss at length last month when he came to the Toronto International Film Festival.
For the record, Park Chan-wook is not at his first Cannes honors: his hard-hitting thriller old boy won him the Grand Prix, and Thirst this is my blooda brilliant vampiric retelling of Therese Raquinthe Jury Prize.
This latest project began to take shape shortly after filming for the spy series wrapped. The Little Drummer Girl (The little girl with the drum), based on the novel by John le Carré, starring Florence Pugh (Don’t Worry Darling), and of which Park Chan-wook directed the six episodes in 2018.
“I wanted to return to an elegant love story, but I didn’t really know which one. At the same time, I read the novels featuring detective Martin Beck [écrits par Maj Sjöwall et Per Wahlöö], and the desire came to me to develop a procedural crime drama with a non-violent detective character, who is not a genius but is quite intelligent, has a good heart, is courteous… And so, I had these two competing desires, these two types of stories. »
Then, one day, the filmmaker had the idea of merging his two desires. Once the main lines of the story had been decided, Park Chan-wook began to write the script with Jeong Seo-kyeong, his collaborator since lady revenge in 2005.
Fascinating heroines
Winding story of a vengeful ex-con, lady revenge is for the account hinge in the work of the scenario writer. In fact, if he is a constant in the cinema of Park Chan-wook, and Decision to leave is only the most recent example, it is the character as complex as fascinating of its female characters: see I am a cyborg, Stoker, Thirst this is my bloodand especially Miss.
“You have to go back to one of my first films, JSA:Joint Security Area, which is built around a female officer assigned to investigate a murder that occurred in the joint guard area of the two Koreas. In the original novel, the character was male. I made this change because I found it more interesting to explore what happens when a woman enters this hypermacho world of the military. The plot is based on the tensions and competition between North Korea and South Korea, but suddenly, faced with this woman who is investigating them, the men of the two armies stand together. »
Alas, to pursue Park Chan-wook, when leaving JSA: Joint Security Areawhich in its time broke all box office records in South Korea, actress Lee Young-hue was eclipsed by her male partners in the media eye.
“I found it unfair. A few years later, I therefore wrote the title role of lady revenge, a partition opposite to the previous one where she could give the full measure of her register. This time, nothing and no one overshadowed it. And anyway, my attention to my female characters really started there. »
Still with regard to the female characters, it is generally through them that happen, in the middle or during the third act, as the case may be, these almost 180-degree narrative reversals of which Park Chan-wook has the secret. We thought he was going there, while all this time he was planning his exit in a completely different direction.
“When I see a film that unfolds as I expected, it bothers me, admits the filmmaker. I try to make mine not predictable. »
Decision to leave is in this respect stuffed with enigmatic passages which find their full meaning as the ending approaches. Among these, there is this proverb of Confucius that Seo-rae (Tang Wei, star of Lust, Cautionby Ang Lee) whispers to Hae-jun (Park Hae-il, discovered in Memories of Murder, by Bong Joon-ho): “The man of heart likes the mountains, the man of intelligence likes the water. Here, a rocky peak and the sea will play a key role in the destiny of the protagonists…
Stay tuned
Regarding the Directing Prize awarded to the film last May, it is perfectly deserved. Indeed, Park Chan-wook not only deploys his customary mastery, but manages to raise it up a notch.
There are thus truly brilliant sequences, such as when, hidden in his unmarked car in order to monitor the suspect, Hae-jun transports himself in thought to Seo-rae’s house. Here is the detective planted in the middle of the kitchen where the widow is busy preparing her supper, then watching her with a melancholy eye while she remains seated, motionless, in the half-light of the living room. These passages recall certain sequences of the film The Fury (Fury), by Brian De Palma, one of Park Chan-wook’s master filmmakers, when the heroine has visions of the past in which she appears without being there.
“I am a director who carefully plans every shot, every movement. I use storyboards extremely precise — I make storyboards even for a banal dialogue scene in shot-reverse shot. I collect all that and I make a book of it, of which I give a copy to each member of the team. That said, I remain on the lookout for the smallest thing — an unexpected event, a flash last minute — which could improve my film. »
To illustrate his point, the filmmaker quotes the work of the actors: “Sometimes, something unexpected, something that I hadn’t anticipated, emanates from their acting, and that’s even better. My radar works continuously during a shoot. »
lightning in the bottle
This admission does not fail to astonish as the realization turns out to be virtuoso: one would tend to imagine Park Chan-wook as an absolute control freak, a bit like Stanley Kubrick. In this case, one of the most memorable sequences of Decision to leave results from an improvisation on the part of the filmmaker who, for lack of time attributable to logistical and meteorological constraints, had to change his filming plan on this occasion.
This is the sequence at the top of the peak from which the victim fell, filmed at night, in a snowstorm that looks like a supernatural mist: at one point, the “perhaps femme fatale” stands behind the detective, and an unbearable suspense arises from the fact that we do not know if she will push him into the void or not. He is in the foreground, she in the back, out of focus, with her headlamp above her black silhouette, like a ghostly apparition.
Except that, as we mentioned, none of this was included in the initial technical breakdown. This visual “happy accident” was the result of chance. Knowing how to recognize and immortalize such moments of grace, Orson Welles once compared it to “catching lightning in a bottle”.
“I was struck by this vision of Tang Wei, says the director. I immediately asked Kim Ji-yong [le directeur photo] to review the lighting so as to amplify this almost supernatural effect. Tang Wei suddenly looked like a beacon in the night. This image was so strong that it transcended the human form and transformed the character into a mythical creature, into a spirit. It was amazing, unplanned, and yet completely in tune with the character. »
Finally, what is however not at all surprising, is that Park Chan-wook used this famous proverb of Confucius. Man of heart or man of intelligence? He is obviously both.