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Time and place for everything?

Decision to leave (Korean; 2022)
Director: Park Chan-wook

The ageing brain finds it difficult to learn new tricks. Hence, it compensates for its deficiencies by filling them with old remote thoughts. Whilst watching this Korean thriller noir, a conversation with an old friend, 20 years previously, resurfaced.

P was an ambitious young man when he was posted as a secondary school teacher in a remote part of the country. His rumbling young heart knew then that he was made for bigger things in life, but teaching a bunch of uninitiated young kids in the periphery was a start.

Being well versed in the Malay Language, he was quite a hit amongst the locals, particularly his young lady colleagues. These young lassies were all over him, eating out of his hand and at his beck and call. Bending over backwards to be in his company, there were unabashed invitations for intimacy.

Such good chemistry, sensual without being sexual

On further prodding by his nosey on more juicy details, P told them there was nothing more to say. Nothing happened. With a blank face, he said something to the effect of, "one should defecate where he eats!"

P went on to spend his free time preparing for his law degree. Soon enough, he resigned from his teaching stint and is now a flying legal eagle.

In every profession, situations may arise where one can obtain personal favours. He may be lured to use his positions to curry flavours to fulfil self-interests. For that reason, to be professional in a particular job would mean to put the emotional aspect into makings job-related decisions, but to decide with the head and not the heart. But then, when Adolf Eichmann made similar decisions, the world accused him of treating an act of evil as the banalest thing to do.

The protagonist of this Korean thriller noir, Hae-joon, probably did not have a friend like P to advise him on how to act professionally. Married but a weekend husband only as he is stationed as a police detective in another town, he is assigned to investigate a hiker who is found dead. During the course of his investigation, ruling out the hiker's sensual wife, Seo-rae, as a possible suspect, he is drawn closer to her. A Chinese immigrant, a caretaker of the elderly with a clear alibi of innocence, she is off the hook. But there seems more than meets the eye as Seo-rae is seen six months later with another husband who just happens to die soon after their meet!

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Location: Vladivostok, Primorsky Krai, Russia

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