nikitalinivenko

Decision To Leave is Park Chan-Wook's best movie since Oldboy, but there's a caveat. The framing is pleasing, the look is good, and Decision To Leave is by far and away the year's best edited movie (seriously, that editing!). It, however, gets zero points for plot. The story is plucked right off the dusty stock shelf: A murder's committed and the detective assigned to investigate falls for the victim's Femme Fatale wife, to the point he's willing to jeopardize his career to cover for her; and no matter how much you gunk the movie with pretentious symbolism (Those safe, stable mountains! That wishy-washy sea!), if anything it makes the stock-in-trade formulaic outline more tiresome. Fortunately, the technical aspects more than compensate. It's been six years since The Handmaiden (a critical darling that, I'll be honest, I remember almost zero about, since I found it one of those boredoms so stupendous it humbles, and struggled to retain any of it) but directionally, Park is still at the peak of his prowess. A damn good movie that, though personally, left something to be desired - and seemed longer than it is (and maybe went on a bit longer than it needed to, given the aforementioned familiar plot) - is, more or less, still alright to piss away a few good hours on, especially given how long it's been since Park was last at it.

6.5/10.

The Virgin Suicides plays it pretty safe on the source material - in that it's an almost straight-up visualizer of Jeffrey Eugenides' 1993 novel (there's pretty much literally only one change from the book, and that comes towards the end). It is one of the closest adaptations I've seen, if that means anything at all.

Set in a quiet Detroit suburb, the plot - and all the teenage angst, ennui and loneliness it melancholically baggages the characters, and us the audience, with - centers around local boys who are infatuated with a group of sisters, sheltered and seemingly unattainable, qualities that add to their feminine mystique and, ultimately, inform the downward spiral the plot takes.

The original score by Air is by far the best character in the movie (and has slowly grown on me as perhaps an all-time favorite - an interesting tidbit: The Virgin Suicides is one of only two original movie soundtrack albums included in the book 1,001 Albums You must Hear Before You Die (the other being Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack for Superfly)). Everything else about the movie is pretty basic and quiet (I now realize, The Virgin Suicides might quintessentially be a brooding, mature older sister to another (much more juvenile) sleeper-hit high-school dreck - Napoleon Dynamite), slight and nondescript (similarly-toned, slow-paced indie titles like The Myth of The American Sleepover (2010) are a dime a dozen).

The movie, is, especially on first viewing (I'd softened up on it after the second), a bore; the sort of bore that's more rewarding in literary form...what I mean is, the novel is better. The movie, on its own, is decent, but lacks anything to elevate it above the teen malaise it uses as a crutch to avoid doing anything substantial. Whatever. It's still somewhat better than most high school movies, and the quiet direction that would be borderline insufferable in the hands of most indie directors, has a soft, low-key texture in the hands of Sofia Coppola.