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Decision to Leave: A cracking romantic thrillerThe director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden is back with an updated "cop-me...
26/05/2022

Decision to Leave: A cracking romantic thriller
The director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden is back with an updated "cop-meets-femme-fatale" film, which is a "gleaming treat", but falters structurally, writes Nicholas Barber.
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Stand back, James Stewart. You too, Michael Douglas. There's a new lovestruck detective in town, and he can fixate on crimes, chase bad guys up staircases and make crucial mistakes with the best of them. The man to thank is Park Chan-wook. Six years after The Handmaiden premiered at Cannes, the Korean director is back at the festival with Decision to Leave, a neo-noir mystery in the tradition of Vertigo and Basic Instinct. He updates the typical cop-meets-femme-fatale scenario with smart watches, Google Translate and various nifty gadgets: I was especially fond of the chainmail glove the detective uses to defend himself from an assailant's knife. Park also freshens up the genre with a host of imaginative shots, intricate edits and fantasy sequences, and he playfully parodies and subverts its tropes. But essentially Park and his co-writer Chung Seo-kyung have made a cracking post-Hitchcock romantic thriller with everything that requires, from intimate interrogations to rooftop chases to people standing on clifftops as the waves crash on the beach below.

Why you should embrace stinging nettlesWith voracious growth and a harsh sting, what's to love about nettles? Quite a lo...
24/05/2022

Why you should embrace stinging nettles
With voracious growth and a harsh sting, what's to love about nettles? Quite a lot actually.
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During World War One, the scarecrows of Germany began to disappear from fields. It wasn't that they had gone for a wander, it was because there was a serious shortage of clothing. The British Navy had introduced a blockade of European ports to starve Germany and Austria-Hungary of goods and raw materials, including cotton, so the scarecrows' garments had become too valuable to be left for the birds.

In 1916, the German clothing industry was urgently placed under state control, and the private trade of second-hand garments was forbidden. "An appeal was made to the patriotism of German women to maintain a simplicity of dress 'more in keeping with the seriousness of the times'," noted a trade report written in 1918 for the US Department of Commerce. The authorities rationed stockings to two pairs per person every three months, introduced a rule on maximum dress-length, and requisitioned old blankets, table-cloths and handkerchiefs for recycling – even the linen on which old maps were printed.

It became clear that an alternative to cotton-based textiles was needed, not least to supply the armed forces in the trenches. Various other materials were explored, such as mungo (recycled wool), shoddy (a byproduct of wool processing), flax, and even paper. But one researcher based in Vienna, Gottfried Richter, had a suggestion for something better. He had been working on it for 15 years, and reckoned it could solve Germany and Austria-Hungary's clothing woes. It was a plant that, with highly fibrous stems, could be woven into thread, matching other materials like flax for quality, and was already growing widely and voraciously in the forests and meadows of Central and Eastern Europe.

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