Return to Seoul: Melancholic and mesmerising
Review Overview
A messily contradictory protagonist
9A mesmerising Ji-min Park
10Subtle, cumulative storytelling
9Anton Bitel | On 10, Jul 2023
Director: Davy Chou
Cast: Ji-Min Park, Oh Kwang-rok, Guka Han, Kim Sun-young, Yoann Zimmer, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Hur Ouk-sook, Émeline Briffaud, Régine Vial Goldberg, Cho-woo Choi
Certificate: 15
Return To Seoul begins, as indeed it ends, with music. We hear a song playing over plain yellow-on-black credits – and it is only when we see Tena (Guka Han) in close-up, listening on large headphones, that the music is revealed to be intradiegetic. When Frédérique “Freddie” Benoît (Ji-Min Park, in her extraordinary first rôle) walks into the Seoul hotel where Tena works, her first words (in broken English) are “What are you listening?… can I listen?” – and when she puts on Tena’s headphones to hear what has been described as “Korean music”, her face lights up with a strange recognition.
Freddie herself both is and is not Korean. She was born there 25 years earlier, but was one of hundreds of thousands of children put up for adoption and sent abroad. Raised by loving parents in France, and insistently thinking of herself as French, she has travelled to Seoul on a random whim – or, at least, so she tells her mother (Régine Vial Goldberg) on the phone – after her flight to Tokyo was suddenly cancelled and an alternative was offered. Freddie may have “pure Korean traits”, but she cannot speak Korean and is swift to reject any local custom that she sees infringing on her personal freedoms. She is caught between cultures.
“Do you know what sight-reading is?” Freddie asks Tena in a bar, as the unmistakable opening beats of Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead (1979) kicks in on the soundtrack. “It’s when you play a score for the first time. You have to be able to analyse the music in one glance, evaluate the danger and jump in.” Although Freddie was once a musician, here she uses sight-reading as a metaphor for social fluency, which she immediately demonstrates by deftly bringing together complete strangers from different tables for some boozy match-making, despite not speaking their language. Freddie knows how to read a room, and thrives on forming rapid, often risky connections with others – although she can be just as quick to drop them. “I could wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers,” she will later tell her loving French boyfriend, Maxime (Yoann Zimmer), who has joined her on a business trip to Seoul – and we know she is telling the truth. Freddie loses attachments as quickly as she makes them. She was, after all, herself abandoned as a baby.
Those rhythms from the Bauhaus track will recur at various points in the film. While the song inevitably evokes both the undead and the famous opening sequence of Ridley Scott’s The Hunger (1983), here Freddie is not a literal vampire – even if later the track will accompany her as she prowls the back alleys of Seoul at night dressed in a distinctively vampish black cape. Rather, the song captures the detachment and otherness of this free-spirited misfit. Freddie may be confident, but she is not self-assured. She may be assertive but she is uncertain – and, while her middle-aged Tinder date André (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) suggests that she would do brilliantly in his arms-dealing business, where “you have to be able to not look back”, in fact Freddie’s restless mobility is tied to her sense of disconnection. In all her globe-trotting travels, she keeps coming back to Korea on a quest for origins. Even her stated predilection for “older guys” seems to reflect a search for daddy. Tena’s diagnosis, after Freddie tries to kiss her, seems spot on: “You’re a very sad person.” Freddie is missing something, and always trying to find something or someone to fill that emptiness. This is the human condition.
Davy Chou’s film is a portrait of a complex, contradictory woman ever on the move, and seen at various stages of her changing life – but it is also, at its heart, an adoption drama. Freddie may not at first have set out to seek her biological parents, but her arrival in Seoul leads her to visit the Hammond Adoption Centre and start the process of making contact with them. This puts her almost immediately in touch with her maudlin father (Oh Kwang-rok) and his family – an encounter that both father and daughter, in different ways, find overwhelming, but, over many years, manages to mellow into something more healthy. After all, both of them, in the period after that first encounter, continue to undergo change. Freddie’s birth mother (Cho-woo Choi) proves more elusive, in a film where connections are often made and lost again – and yet these blood relations, and the many other people whom Freddie meets on her journey, are a part of her without defining her.
Much like Freddie’s sexuality, her cultural ties and her very notion of home, here identity itself is fluid – but for all her impulsiveness in the moment, the construction of Freddie’s identity, and the process of disinterring her lost past, takes time. So does the film, closely observing this mercurial character in motion over several years, and several returns to Seoul, as her sense of individualism is tested, as her embrace of rootlessness is loosened, and as her negotiation of family is lost in translation. Still, Freddie’s gift is that even if she may not at first know all the right notes, she has the courage to play the tune anyway, making music composed by someone else very much her own. The results are equally melancholic and mesmerising.