South Korea’s Park Chan-wook wins finest director award at Cannes for his  film “Decision To Leave”

By AFP

CANNES: South Korean star film-maker Park Chan-wook on Saturday gained the Cannes Film Festival’s finest director award for his erotic crime film “Decision To Leave”.

Starring Chinese star Tang Wei and Korean actor Park Hae-il, “Decision To Leave” tells the story of a detective who, investigating a person’s deadly fall from a mountain, comes below the spell of the sufferer’s spouse, whom he suspects of getting brought about her husband’s dying.

The detective story more and more meshes with the mutual attraction engulfing the principle characters, and the ensuing erotic pressure that’s heightened by the fixed proximity of dying.

“I’m not a romantic, but I’m very interested in the expression of emotions,” stated Park in an interview with AFP when the movie premiered on the pageant.

“Decision To Leave” was warmly obtained by Cannes audiences. The BBC known as it a “cracking romantic thriller” and Screen stated that “even without the extreme shock tactics of some of his earlier work, Park can craft a deeply satisfying and potentially commercial thriller”.

The movie’s mesmerising soundtrack consists of the Adagietto in Gustav Mahler’s fifth Symphony, immortalised within the 1971 film “Death In Venice” by Luchino Visconti.

“I tried to find other classical pieces that could work, but this piece by Mahler was just ideal,” Park, 58, stated. “And I thought, is there a law that says only Visconti gets to use this piece? No there isn’t, so I went ahead.”

Park’s Cannes entry comes almost twenty years after his “Oldboy” which gained the pageant’s second-highest prize in 2004 and helped catapult South Korean cinema onto the worldwide stage — years earlier than “Parasite”, which gained the 2019 Palme d’Or and finest movie on the 2020 Oscars.

Park stated the movie drew inspiration from the methodical police work contained within the Swedish “Martin Beck” crime thriller books. “That’s what I wanted to represent in a movie,” he stated.