Return to Seoul Review: The Metamorphosis of Identities in Transit
The story in Return to Seoul (French: Retour à Séoul) talks of the existential burden that comes with being a foreigner to one’s own home, and by extension, to themselves. It follows Frédérique Benoît a.k.a Freddie (Park Ji-min), a 25-year-old French-raised foster child, who impulsively returns to her birthplace in South Korea, for the first time since her adoption. The headstrong young woman, navigating a country she knows virtually nothing about, embarks on a search for her biological parents, all on a whim. We’re taken through a long, winding road through her late 20s, equal parts chaos, tenderness, and solace.
Director Davy Chou does an impressive job of underscoring the cultural divide among characters in the film. Firstly, we discover that Freddie does not speak Korean, and so she finds herself befriending the hotel worker who, in a fortunate turn of events, happens to be a fluent French speaker. Later in the evening, they would find themselves in a Korean barbecue restaurant. Here, we see them meeting a few locals, revealing Freddie’s lack of awareness of local customs (For instance, upon being informed that pouring each other’s drinks is a subtle gesture of respect, she pours her own drink anyway). Despite being told that she has a “typical Korean face,” Freddie, in all ways, save for her ethnicity, remains an outsider throughout the film.
Freddie’s visit to South Korea initially seems aimless and impetuous; She only decided to visit the adoption agency after a random suggestion. She’s impulsive and the premise is pretty straightforward. However, she soon finds out that the road she traverses leads her to even tougher choices down the line. As it turns out, her birth parents left their social security numbers and contact information in her adoption file. More questions begin to linger and conclusions are scarce. Will she contact her biological mother and father? Will they even respond? Why would they respond anyway? And if so, how will they maneuver around the language barrier?
Slowly, things unravel in ways she never expected; She receives a call and an invitation from her father. This would take her to his home in Gunsan, a city outside of Seoul, where he now lives with a new family. He’s remorseful for the actions that led to the ocean-wide gap between him and his daughter, and he wants a chance at redemption. Freddie, on the other hand, isn’t receptive to his attempts at reconciliation.
Our protagonist appears unenthusiastic and reluctant throughout their encounters. All Freddie’s dad gets are short, sharp statements that her hotel-worker-friend-slash-translator often had to soften to make her sound more polite. It’s another reminder that while relationships may find a common linguistic thread, people’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas can still be lost in translation. Some nuances just fall through the cracks.
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Park Ji-min gives a raw and gripping performance as Freddie across several periods in her life. The film’s three random time jumps span a total of eight years. It’s quite the spectacle, and it’s certainly a stylistic choice that fits the narrative and arc of our main character. It serves its purpose, which is to showcase the contrasting changes in Freddie’s personality. During each of these stages, we see completely different people, reshaped again with each act. The only thing that remains constant is her inexplicable magnetism toward Korea. It begs the question: is she becoming more connected or disconnected from herself? We see this communicated in the switching of the color grading, mirroring Freddie’s current state. These, combined with Park’s subtle yet unmistakable evocation of the kind of deep-seated, long-buried pain that conceals itself in a facade of coldness, make for the portrayal of a stranger in conflict with her origins.
Return to Seoul strays from the typical coming-of-age homecoming genre. It’s neither warm nor is it cold. Viewers aren’t getting happy tears here. Instead, it pictures a young adult woman grasping for something she can’t quite capture—a home, an identity, a sense of belonging. Freddie’s character is oftentimes disagreeable. She can be moody at times, angsty almost always, and exudes a kind of stony self-confidence that can only be described as, well, French. She’s flawed as a human being can be, in other words. But there's this certain je ne sais quoi to her that we relate to and connect on some affable level.
In a way, maybe we all can relate to the need to reinvent ourselves in hopes of finally figuring out our supposed “place” in the world. It is, after all, a long, uneasy journey that very few find the courage to actually begin with. The narrative can be painstaking, as its structure reflects the complexity and unpredictability of the plot, but it’s a stunner of a film. It’s the kind of story that’s both riveting and frustrating, the kind of piece you think of in silence on the car ride home.
Freddie stands to represent the 200,000 or so children who were sent for intercountry adoption at the onset of the Korean War in the 1950s. And if nothing else, Freddie is an embodiment of the many adoptees across the world, looking for pieces to their jigsaw puzzle, hoping to find a resemblance to home. They are oftentimes burdened by the incessant need to make themselves "whole" again. Thus, these people come to learn that, ultimately, this internal restlessness comes to define their transformation.
Return to Seoul is part of the10th QCinema International Film Festival Asian Next Wave lineup.
