‘Decision To Leave’ Director Park Chan-Wook On His Romantic Detective Noir & “Opening Your Eyes Within The Mist” [NYFF]
With a formalist’s eye for visual symmetry, an architect’s sense of structure, and a poet’s ability to stoke the passions raging inside his precisely balanced frames, Park Chan-wook makes ferociously controlled films about ferocious, uncontrollable impulses. Ever since his international breakthrough with 2003’s “Oldboy,” remembered most for the oft-imitated hallway sequence in which a hammer-wielding Choi Min-sik lays waste to enemy waves in a righteous bid for freedom, the South Korean filmmaker has been widely associated with operatic bursts of sexuality and extreme violence, the kind often considered a signature of the New Korean Cinema. Park has hardly shied from this notoriety, even binding “Oldboy” together with “Sympathy for Mr.