True Romanticism

Whatever happened to Romanticism in art? It’s disappeared, but, strangely, its elements are everywhere in the art we enjoy. Love, I suppose, not so much these days—but beauty and miserable suffering are everywhere, especially in what the young enjoy, sentimentality and brutality. A terrible longing is the only thing available to the sentimental education of the young, except the most contemptible activism. Romantic love is the kind of love that gets people killed—until recently, everyone knew it from Romeo and Juliet. It’s mad, yet somehow more dignified than throwing tantrums in college or social media and becoming a celebrity.

All this came to mind recently when I saw Park Chan-wook’s beautiful movie, Decision to Leave (2022). It’s something of a noir movie, a detective story with a femme fatale, a conflict between duty and desire. It’s all about how love gets people killed and, therefore, about what we want out of beauty and, perhaps, what we want out of art. The movie is justly celebrated—it was nominated for BAFTAs, won Park the Best Director award in Cannes, along with his fourth nomination for the Palme d’Or, and was even shortlisted for the Oscars before the Academy screwed up once more.

Which in turn makes me think about the director’s career—now nearly 60, Park’s got remarkable award nominations for just about every movie he’s made since 2000’s Joint Security Area, a fine thriller about the DMZ separating the two Koreas. His most famous movie, Oldboy (2003), a work about politics and morality in South Korea and the centerpiece of his Vengeance Trilogy, won the Grand Prix in Cannes and was remade by Spike Lee in 2013. But the Oscars ignored it, as with the rest of his career.

He appears to have become the final Romance artist as a result of this fame and its bounds. Following his political films, he turned to love— unhappy love, which emerges from a political circumstance but leads to more profound inquiries about what we want from life. According to Park’s films, the majority of political but is simply suffering removed from its philosophical context, which is how we deal with it. Or we could kill while remaining true to love, the desire to feel understood, and any other way that helped us get past our limitations.

Behold Decision to Leave: Detective Jang is a remarkably competent man working homicide in Korea’s second-largest city, Busan. He’s 40, handsome, and cares about skin moisturizing (Korean guys are different), but he above all wants to excel at his job, which is pretty much his entire life. He wants to be beautiful and noble, but he’s so incredibly unhappy that he’s an insomniac—he’s restless because it’s impossible to be a hero in Korea. Even the wish is a secret we have to untangle (like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a man driven mad by Romanticism and political ambition).

You could argue that you should quit your job and live a fulfilling career. What about your life? However, the nuclear scientist who Detective Jang is engaged to is raising his child to be a scientist. They hardly interact on weekends, so she seems to want him to move into the small township where her nuclear plant is and become more of a housewife. Their marriage appears to be both reputable and utterly crazy at the same time, so I won’t ruin the jokes for you. What happens if dignity turns a human love into knowledge?

This is the Korean context into which love erupts, in the shape of the beautiful Tang Wei (who won acclaim in Cannes for starring in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution in 2007). She’s a Chinese immigrant to Korea, as out of place in her way as he is in his. She comes to his attention as the widow of a man who died a strange, almost inexplicable death, a mountain climbing accident. Then in the second half of the movie, she’s married again, and comes to be widowed again. The femme is indeed fatale, almost like a goddess in a myth, involving love and death both. But for all his investigation, he finds it impossible to blame her, much less accuse her of murder. He falls in love with her instead.

Much of the mystery of Decision to Leave has to do with why he loves her—obviously, she’s a beautiful woman in need of help, a victim as many immigrants are, and he’s a man without any great adventure. Chivalry almost explains it. But Park has something different in mind. He suggests detective and suspect are disturbed by their similarity. For one, we learn gradually that the woman is the only character anywhere near as smart as detective Jang. She learns at least as much about him as he does about her.

Romeo, incidentally, also suffered from insomnia as a result of fancy. With really similar results, this wife treats Jang’s depression just as effectively as Juliet did Romeo. Park may not be as successful as he could be due to his preference for disaster. The film builds to a tragic conclusion that begs the passionate question,” Is death the testimony of fancy?” Despite being lovely and frequently humorous and speaking to our suspicions that much of life is opportunity or irony.

The refugee and the police officer may get married in a Hollywood film, uniting anyone. But that seems to have more to do with political self-assurance than it does with personal adore— what if finding one’s self outside of dignity or abroad is necessary for true love? Park appears to be considering the moviegoers — those of us who desire beauty but fear that it will result in death rather than a happy life. He might be interested in seeing if we would lose our minds like his figures, whom he treats with as much affection as humour, just so we can see how it all turns out.

The manager is made up of two characters: the detective, who shamelessly probes people’s lives and deaths, and the woman— who isn’t honest but is actually more compassionate and caring than he is. Park aspires to this kind of achievement: an audience that enjoys his films despite the fact that they attempt to reconcile and maintain sanity our desire for justice, our gloomy desire to see offences, and our belief in beauty in some sort of ideal answer that lifts us out of that shadow.

Decision to Leave is streaming on Amazon Prime.

Titus Techera is the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation and a film critic for Law & Liberty, the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty, and The Free Press.