Warning: movie spoilers and TW for suicide and physical violence.
The 2000 movie Joint Area Security, which Park Chan-wook considers his real directorial debut, starts off in a decidedly campy way. A hue of bright imagination appears to colour its portrayal of the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. Add to that the seemingly one-dimensional characters with accents that stick out like a sore thumb, and it leaves the viewer in comfortable anticipation of a light-hearted investigative film — a “popcorn watch”, so to speak. But one scene at a time, the movie goes entirely against this expectation, leading the viewer to a truly vulnerable place.
This subtle diversion from the initial tone comes into play through small details from the very beginning. Two interrogations are taking place simultaneously, on different floors of a single building. One character becomes more and more cornered until he reacts in an extreme way — after attempting and failing to shoot himself in the face, he leaps out of the window to his death.
This is an early scene in Park’s filmography that hints towards the nature of his creative compass. Blunted by the campy tonal values and dated cinematographic choices of the time, it takes a retrospective view of the scene, following a better recognition of Park’s tastes, for it to reveal its deeper significance. A character that chooses death over revealing the central mystery is a known if uncommon trope in the mystery genre. Yet, when presented by Park, his hands inexorably lead him to engineer a deep, overwhelming emotion underneath this event — the muted shock of a suicide attempt where the gun doesn’t go off; the aggressive and immediate change in recourse; the eyes of the two soldiers locked onto each other through the window as one of them falls to his death. And then there is the pitiful gaze of Sergeant Soo-hyeok (Lee Byung-hun), otherwise stoic in demeanour, betraying intense shock and grief. As the movie progresses, the picture that eventually unravels is that of an instance of essential human goodness inevitably corrupted by circumstance, leaving the door open for its participants to cave into their worst instincts.
Violence has a special place in the cinema of Park Chan-wook, but his violence draws from a very different well than the average action film. In fact, the auteur has tried his hand at a variety of different genres, yet the tonal throughline that appears through all of his works, regardless of genre, is the same. An unstoppable pull towards the dark heart of what might well be called the Jungian shadow, or at the very least an irresistible pull towards all the inner instincts and emotions we naturally seek to avoid, appears to be what defines Park’s artistic vision.
And so it is that Decision to Leave is at face a romance mystery, but it doesn’t ground itself in either of these genres tonally. The viewer is not allowed to experience the plot through the emotional lenses of its characters; instead, they are thrust forcibly outside, to make do with opaque actions, and are set up to experience a bitter crash course toward self-ruin.
Through the course of his decades-long career as a filmmaker, Park appears to have stayed remarkably true to his artistic journey. Although he has explored storytelling over diverse genres, the fundamental inquiry that drives all of his stories seems to be connected with the inner shadow — the ugliness of human instinct when faced with fate’s potential to conjure shockingly tragic narratives. In exploring this question, Park’s films have sought to capture aspects of the human experience that many artists might seek to ignore.
The idea explains the sheer magnetism of his body of work. A meditation upon this question has seeped into Park’s visual aesthetic quite effectively. While his films have always contained memorable frames, most commonly by using striking placements of the human face, his visual symbolism has appeared to grow ever more elaborate as time passes by. In The Handmaiden, he demonstrates an obsessive desire to express the power dynamics between characters through his framed compositions. Decision to Leave leaves behind much of its meaning in the mere plot; the meat of the story, which is the complex relationship between Seo-rae (Tang Wae) and Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), is brought to life through complex but subtle choices in the cinematography.
The end result is one that is satisfying in its execution and simultaneously frustrating in its emotional complexity and bitterness. As a true adherent to the belief in art’s pure functions of exploring and recreating the hidden aspects of the human psyche, he has mastered an entire arena of sensations that can best be described only as “oppressive discomfort.” It is this tone of oppressive discomfort that creates a convincing arena for the relationship between the two lead characters to develop, with deceit overlapping mutual feelings.
Some of Park’s most beguiling achievements are when, through the haze of this complex bitterness, he clearly outlines the shades of something brighter, reaching towards a rock-hard sense of realism through means that often elude the most serious filmmakers. In his purity of artistic intent, he has proven to be one of the bravest storytellers when it comes to portraying tragedy, one of the most capable in creating natural, organic humour in cinema, and the most discerning when it comes to recreating the muddled, deeply complex realities of the human heart, fraught with contradictions.
In Decision to Leave, the relationship between its lead characters is coloured in nothing but distrust and an abiding sense of taboo throughout. But as the movie nears its end, this ugliness rearranges itself to make way for a pure attachment between the two; in the final frames of the movie, this feeling is solidified in a bizarre final act in which Seo-rae willingly gives up her life in a bizarre, darkly beautiful manner to ensure that she remains ever in Hae-jun’s mind. I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK manages to reach a similar excess of emotional complexity, revealing glances of a pitiful picture of childhood neglect and personal tragedy behind its elaborate schizo-fantastic narrative.
In the strenuously evocative experience known as The Vengeance Trilogy, Park takes the willing audience to the very precipice of emotional shock, and then goes on to demonstrate a callous ability to seamlessly blend those moments with natural, organic humour. The seamless merging of horrific tragedy with the absurd entry of a long, static scene that is effortlessly, authentically humorous is a typical Park Chan-wook touch that leaves one in a space beyond laughing and crying.
It’s incomprehensible when you consider the amount of time that the average person spends getting acquainted and indoctrinated into the standard forms of fiction. Yet, taken out of that fictional context, in real life, it is how humans have always navigated the intolerable emotional excesses of traumatic experiences. Park’s humour, placed in the midst of the most traumatic events, reminds the viewer that life continues to exist outside the boundaries of that moment. The realization that the impersonal rigidity of life, with which non-living objects exist also applies to living things and their relationships, is a highly particular and frightening aspect of sentient life. It comes close to approaching the primal fears of humanity — the fear of meaninglessness, of irrelevance.
Out of this understanding, it is common for Park’s stories to express tragedy in a dispassionate way, where the protagonist is no longer a martyr of his own story, but simply a life lived that doesn’t exist anymore. Among the many shocking moments in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance that forced me to pause and recover, was the scene that shows the aftermath of Dong-jin’s (Song Kang-ho) revenge over Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun). A number of rice bags, tied at the top and caked in dried blood. A blue plastic sheet, red plastic gloves, an angle grinder, a white jerrycan — all of them spotted with blood. Ryu’s tattered clothes lie on a small pile to the side. The movie completely extinguishes the existence of a protagonist that it spent its entire runtime humanizing. Ryu doesn’t just die at the end; by dehumanizing him off-screen in such a manner, and leaving a short reminder of the same through these shots, it clearly drives this point home.
It’s interesting how Park continues to profess an interest in diverse film genres to this day. Speaking in interviews about stories he wishes to work on next, he has mentioned scripts in genres like sci-fi. It would be exciting to witness what deeper layer of humanity that the genius of Park Chan-wook, willing and eager to go where few others do, discovers in these genre conventions.
