The answer, in a nutshell, is “nothing”. But the journalists obsessed with that film keep returning to it a little obtusely. Here’s how Park, at the Cannes Film Festival, told the differences and similarities between the two films.
There is no doubt that, with Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook is the most important and respected Korean director. And it is equally undeniable that the film that gave this master great international success was Old Boy. Undoubtedly, too, that Old Boy and its new, beautiful Decision to Leave, which has arrived in Italian cinemas these days, are films that are very different from each other. But the way journalists, al Cannes Film Festival dove Decision to Leave was presented in competition and won the prize for best director, returning to the comparison between the two films, separated by twenty years and by profoundly different stories, there was something vaguely perverse and subtly obtuse about it.
Fact is that Park, interviewed about a very refined film, which mixes mélo, procedural thriller, noir and even comedy, had to repeatedly answer questions about the absence of the themes of violence and revenge, and about what had changed in him over the course of these twenty years. As if a director, an author, cannot tackle cinema in other ways and with other themes.
With all oriental composure, Park he replied with elegant simplicity to these not always acute observations.
On violence, and its absence, he explained, for example, that “it’s not that art should soften because of the difficult times we’ve been through. Simply I wanted the viewer to pay close attention to the subtle variations in the emotions felt by the protagonists in this film, so I removed everything that could be too exciting and stimulating for the senses, in order to get maximum attention to the feelings”.
He also rightly denies Parkof having lost a certain youthful impetuosity: “I don’t know if I should seek the courage to make a film like Old Boy today,” he said, “but there is courage in this film toobut of a different kind. Because there are only the expectations, the labels, the definitions of what one can legitimately expect from one of my films, of what one of my films should be. I have to detach myself from that: it’s easy to keep doing something you’ve always done, it’s more difficult to detach yourself and do something different. In this case I went back to the fundamentals, to the basic language of the film, with a minimum number of elements to tell what I wanted in order to be convincing for the audience, and this was a real challenge”.
Parkwho then kept reassuring those who didn’t give up, revealing that he had several screenplays already written, among which there are still stories of revenge, underlined how, among Old Boy and his other films and this one Decision to Leave the common thread is that of the “moral dilemma. Of course, the way this dilemma appears and manifests itself changes, and the theme of justice is somehow linked to the moral dilemma”.
Another common element, second ParkBetween Old Boy e Decision to Leave is the fact that they are, together with Thirstthe films that most focused on fundamental and universal human emotions, putting aside, however, the reflections on Korean society that are present in his other works.
“What I did was sit down at my computer, write, talk to my co-writer, write some more. Decision to Leave is a story I made up, and if I were to compare my mood between making Old Boy and working on this one, I would say I was the same person.“, he added Park. “I don’t think it’s useful to try to psychoanalyze an author starting from his films, or an artist starting from his work. If I were to try to investigate the psychology of people like Kafka or Hitchcock, it wouldn’t help me enjoy their works at all. If you have the time to do the author’s psychoanalysis, then you better use it to analyze the characters”.
