Cast: Ji-min Park, Oh Kwang-rok, Guka Han, Kim Sun-young, Yoann Zimmer, Hur Ouk-Sook, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing
Director: Davy Chou
Writer: Davy Chou
Return to Seoul is a thoroughly untraditional film, and it demonstrates itself as such right from the beginning. The title tells us where the film is set, but you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell in the first couple of minutes. Instead of any establishing shots, we open with tight close-ups of two women. One is Freddie (Park Ji-min), a European tourist checking into a hostel, and the other is Tena (Guka Hen), the receptionist. We infer that they are in South Korea from the title, their east-asian ethnicities, and the fact that Tena is listening to K-pop on her headphones. Freddie asks if she can listen as well and the film lingers on the looks they exchange as both speak in broken English. Is there an attraction there? Maybe or maybe not. Maybe this will-they-won’t-they love story is the film that Freddie thought she was going to make when she travelled to South Korea on a whim, but it’s not what Return to Seoul ends up being about. Freddie, we learn, was born in Seoul but then was given up for adoption and grew up in France. It turns out Tena speaks French as well, and when this comes up as they go out for drinks together, she and her friends suggest that Freddie go to the Hammond adoption agency to see if she can track down her biological parents. That’s not what she came to the country for, but once the idea takes hold, it’s all that matters from then on.
The agency has Freddie’s file and know the identity, whereabouts, and contact details for her parents. But they have regulations they must follow. The agency can send a message to her parents informing them that their daughter wishes to reach out to them and asking if they wish to meet her. Her father replies, but her mother does not. And so Freddie hops on a bus to Gusan to meet her father (Oh Kwang-rok), bringing Tena along as her support and translator. The meeting is a painfully awkward one full of long-drawn silences and the most strained of polite expressions. Freddie’s father and grandmother weep and embrace her upon their meeting, deeply regretful and apologetic for what they did to her. But they are effectively strangers to her and all she feels for their penance is discomfort. There is a cumbersome back-and-forth that unfolds via Tena, who not only has to translate but must also exercise some cultural sensitivity. When Freddie with her Western sensibilities says something that’s liable to offend or sound too harsh or when her Korean relatives express a conservative attitude or expectation rooted in a culture that is alien to Freddie, Tena will soften the blow with a light mistranslation. These cultural clashes become even harder to navigate when Freddie agrees to spend three nights with her family alone and blows up when she finds the only emotion she can effectively communicate is resentment. This is all in the first act. From there Freddie undergoes a fascinating evolution over the course of years.
We don’t learn a lot about Freddie’s background, her mind only ever seems to be fixed on the present. We infer that things have not been great at home recently with her adoptive parents and that this on some level was what prompted her impromptu visit to the land of her birth. Everything, from her speech to her body language to her actions, convey to us a person who buckles in the face of expectations; even if she isn’t sure who she is, she sure as hell isn’t going to be who anyone else wants her to be. When a local tells her that it is the custom not to pour your own drink in South Korea, she goes right ahead and fills her own glass anyway. She rests her elbows on the table and sprawls on her seat while Tena and the others are more prim and poised. And when Dongwan (Son Seung-Beom) raises the idea of tracking down her parents, she curtly changes the subject and livens things up by inviting the introverted strangers from around the bar to gather at their table. There is a tension to Freddie that she is trying very hard to hide behind a mask of nonchalance. She is an outsider in a place where everyone looks like her. She doesn’t speak the language, but one gent observes that she has a “typical Korean face”, which conflicts with her self-image as a tourist. This isn’t a visit to Seoul after all, it is a return. But it is to a place she does not remember and has no emotional attachment to.
But this cultural tension is only indicative of who Freddie is at this moment in time. As the years go by, she returns to Seoul again and again, a different person each time. There is a deep-seated pain to Freddie rooted in her multifaceted feelings of estrangement, betrayal, and abandonment, and she has yet to find a healthy outlet for it. We watch her indulge in wilful, self-destructive acts, and even afterwards when she does find some stability it is a precarious one. We see her bring a long-term boyfriend from France over to Seoul for a work trip, and when he says something during a dinner that gets under her skin, the only way she can think of to take back control is to cut him out entirely, warning him “I could wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers”. That’s what her birth-mother did to her, the one who left all three of the requests she can legally send in a year unanswered, and it is the only real form of control she has in a world that doesn’t know what to do with her any more than she does. Giving her debut performance, no words can express how truly exceptional Park is as Freddie. Embodying all the changes that her character undergoes across the years while still retaining that core anger fuelling it all, this is a deeply felt and finely tuned performance that builds to devastating heights as she gets closer to finding some sense of personhood.
The story is based on the real-life experience of a French-Korean acquaintance of Chou, and he brings to it an empathetic touch that gets to the heart of what it means to yearn for some semblance of identity, power, and autonomy in the midst of greater forces that confront us with the infinite possibilities of who we could be and who we could’ve been. Freddie would not be the person that she is today had she been kept and raised by her Korean parents, and so there is an inescapable feeling that somewhere in her journey she lost the true version of herself. That gulf of loss and possibility is one that she spends the whole movie trying to fill, and the depiction is so honest and vulnerable that one cannot help but be awestruck and captivated. The camera does open up from those tight close-ups we see at the beginning, but there will always be confines that Freddie shall never be able to escape, even if she does find some measure of closure along the way. Nothing in this film happens the way you expect it to and in the end there aren’t any real answers to be found, only perspective, experience, and maybe acceptance. Perhaps Freddie won’t ever know who she truly is or where she belongs, perhaps she will always be a faceless nomad, but she can find a way to live with that uncertainty and discover her own truths in it.
★★★★★
Aled Warren Films 