come anticipate Park Chan-wook's English-language debut STOKER with me (Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode, Mia Wasikowska)

Think the script/flow of the story was a bit tied up in knots. Had a few questions which I then forgot about in the morning.

I am still being bombarded by the MUBI Squad and the algorithms with trailers to see this. Really just want to watch it again from beginning to end.

MUBI’s campaign for Decision to Leave firing on all cylinders pic.twitter.com/WdNZ3PGWxE

— Reel and Roll Films - Jupe & Jobu Tupaki Freak (@reelandroll) October 20, 2022

good work

Heh

A very involving watch (catching up from my Thursday viewing). I thought the very careful choices in how the subtitles were presented for non-Korean/Chinese speaking audiences who pretty clearly wouldn't catch the important distinctions being made by how one character is able to understand or convey was a real strength.

As I muttered on Twitter, I was also pretty bemused/amused to have Mahler's 5th have a role on it after seeing Tár the other week. But another point of commonality was how both those films and Martine Syms's The African Desperate (also a MUBI thing and just hit the channel yesterday -- highly recommend) found their own distinct ways to work with filming texting/phone use in the present day. And as calz noted the one text conversation in DtL that had the constant changing of a reply was pretty brilliant.

just caught it at the GFT, great piece of cinema. found the second half harder to follow than the first but that's usually when my mind starts to wander

DECISION TO LEAVE is an utter masterpiece

Feel like maybe we should (re)watch every October 26th, sorry I was off a day this yeat.

heh, I made a typo, just like they do in the movie whilst texting

Hoping to see this tomorrow when it opens in Chicago

Okay cool. Maybe we will see you back here in 24 hours or so.

Upon second viewing the thing really held together well. Noticed lots of little things that got repeated and echoed even
blue-green dress/blue-green pills!
just to name one.

Yeah this is super brilliant and insanely, beautifully convoluted. breakneck delivery of story with a ludicrous amount of density and consideration to the plotting and the execution of a thousand tiny important details. And yet, everything is neatly tied up! Super impressive puzzle box work, matched only by the creative and expert camera work. I have other thoughts that need to wait until I can get off the phone and access spoiler tags

Which theater did you go to, The Angelika?

Anyway, while I reserve the right to change my mind, I couldn’t find a hair out of place.

i went to nitehawk which was a weird way to see this but whatever
so am i correct in thinking that what he says to her in korean when he says "bury it deep in the sea" etc can be phonetically translated to chinese as "I love you" and that's what he realizes while he's on the beach?

I thought this was great and there were just so many interesting things going on visually that made it a delight to watch. Not sure I'd call it an utter masterpiece though - like others upthread I think it could have been tightened and was a bit too long, also I found the end a bit histrionic and over the top

the ending made more sense to me this time, but yeah

Long Criterion post here that halfway skimmed but didn’t read yet: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7811-park-chan-wook-s-decision-to-leave

Don’t know it’s just because she has a retro on right now at the Film Forum or not, but something about Tang Wei’s performance reminded me of Isabelle Huppert.

she was fucking great

Something about her performance also reminds me of…the subject of my 2023 1DS.

Although that’s probably a more obvious comparison.

His official statement that he wasn’t consciously channeling Hitchcock but he sees why people might say that is almost laughable given that some of the Hitch callbacks seems as obvious as the nose protector on Mickey Rourke’s face in Angel Heart is an obvious reference to Chinatown (RIP Mike Davis), but who knows, maybe Hitch is just in the water.

Or just in the mist, I should say. It’s in his mist.

I wasn't particularly thinking of Hitchcock while watching it, I'd say the plot driver - troubled cop falls for prime suspect - is a pretty well-established noir trope rather than Hitchcockian per se...

Plot stuff, yes, is standard, but some of the tropes and a few specific scenes are more in his particular line.

so am i correct in thinking that what he says to her in korean when he says "bury it deep in the sea" etc can be phonetically translated to chinese as "I love you" and that's what he realizes while he's on the beach?

Where did you get this from? Do you speak Chinese and/or Korean?

I didn't notice this linguistic component at all but that recording is clearly an admission that he loves her in its substance without him having to literally say it.

oh no I meant to put the end spoiler tag at the end of the post, sorry all

Daniel:
it's a total guess based on context clues and the movies overarching themes of desire to be understood being mangled by emotional/personal distance and technology, but it clarifies the ending neatly so i'm giving it a test run here! Can't find anything immediately from reviewers but there's been a great deal of conversation on the movie server i frequent about how hard this film is to translate for lots of reasons.

what i enjoyed most was how the puzzle pieces in this fit together without pomp or circumstance, sometimes clarifying only when you look back. her decision to commit suicide in a way that echoes exactly what he's told her to do but to do it so that he can never truly know what happened to her is the only way she can be sure she'll never lose him. he'll obsess over her forever and that's enough.

^this

I was thinking it might be a little more simple than translation, just some kind of pronoun trouble. Maybe some of the pronouns for “it “ and “you” are the same in Korean (I only know a handful of words myself) so “throw it into the sea” could also be interpreted as “throw yourself into the sea.”

Hmm, that seems to not be the case, but maybe some similar thing. I guess sooner or later we’ll find out, hopefully before the next October 26th, but maybe exactly then

In addition to the film noir side of things, this obviously has one foot in the doomed, star-crossed, geographically-challenged couples pantheon with things like JR&tB's favorite Lovers of the Arctic Circle.

Saw Decision to Leave without reading anything about it beforehand. Instantly thought of Hitchcock… Vertigo yes, but also Tne Birds, with which it shares a blue-green color palette. In fact, blue vs green is an important plot point in the film. The plot did lose me, though I’m not good with complicated plots in general (cue people to say the plot wasn’t at all complicated… well to me it was). The subtitles often felt stilted to me, though I saw the film with a Korean friend who said the translations were spot-on.

"cue people to say the plot wasn’t at all complicated"

don't worry, that certainly won't be happening! So there might not be some better subs when this gets a dvd release.

it is a very complicated fast moving plot!

Again, check your phone once and you've missed a crucial millisecond.

Including milliseconds on phones.

the moment where they jumped ahead thirteen months and now the lead actress is being beaten up by "slappy", happened so abruptly and with so little explanation that I heard someone in the audience loudly say "WHAT?" and then i realized it was me

A dissenting voice: https://www.vulture.com/article/decision-to-leave-movie-review-directed-by-park-chan-wook.html

The kind of film where if you bend down to tie your shoelaces or something you miss a subtle editing choice your hands get wet because you're standing in an apocalyptic tide

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, October 19, 2022 4:56 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lol!

Trying to watch THIRST before it leaves Criterion.

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/what-i-learned-translating-decision-to-leave