Return to Seoul
At a nondescript dinner spot in Seoul, Freddie (Park Ji-min) sits talking with Tena (Guka Han) and Dongwon (Son Seung-Beom), friends she’s just made. A Korean adoptee raised in France, Freddie has come back to her parents’ country though we don’t know why yet. To find out why she was given up? To find herself? To recover the culture that transnational adoption took away from her? Right now, though, she picks up the soju bottle on her table. Her tablemate stops her it’s rude to pour a drink for yourself, it means you’re not being cared for. But Freddie pours it anyway and knocks it back. She’s always taken care of herself.
In one early scene alone, “Return to Seoul” writer director Davy Chou establishes the mood of Freddie’s visit and years still to come; she immerses herself in a place of discomfort that will bring up repressed emotions both for her and for her family. Her refusal to assimilate or follow cultural propriety can be read as Western arrogance, at the same time, it is also an armor around her independent spirit, which refuses to be tethered by expectation. She isn’t interested in men’s feelings or how much despair her guilt ridden biological family can bear.
Her dad (Oh Kwang-rok) drinks and emails her sad stories about his life he wishes he could have lived longer in order to convince her not to leave Korea again; when she briefly stays with him and his new family members, his mother (Hur Ouk-Sook) cries while praying at night for forgiveness until morning light breaks through their thin curtains but it is too much grief for Freddie to bear. At one point she says angrily about him. “He needs understand that I’m French now! My friends and my family are there!”
But personal boundaries are drawn and redrawn as Freddie lives, loves, loses and works her way through life. This is not a movie about Freddie Going Home To France, it is about her changing relationship with her country of birth as a woman who travels and loves freely, with few ties to keep her in one place for too long.
Chou takes Freddie’s journey out of Seoul and into the countryside to give both her and us a wider scope of Korean history from the metropolitan capital where she’s finally able to get a copy of her adoption records to a riverside town where her father lives. But sometimes in this search for origins she looks like an unwilling participant, asking the bus driver to turn back around or seeking out nocturnal escapism as quickly as possible when emotions become too high.
With cinematographer Thomas Favel, Chou visualizes her trip under overcast skies many of the film’s key scenes take place while it is raining or when streets are slicked from rain that has already come down. The tone is subdued if not somber; at times even romantic, given the neon-lit streets of the city at night. One of the few times a scene is brightly lit is when Freddie talks with her adoptive parents back in France on a hike.
It is clear for a moment, but there is a disconnect between the time change and what parents and their child are going through. She hangs up and she has to figure things out on her own.
Freddie is an angry character. In fact, when it comes to complex characters, Freddie is quite impressive because she embodies a number of conflicting emotions such as anger, loneliness, selfishness and resentment. However, during her vulnerable moments one can sense some injured tenderness or rather tenderness that has been hurt once too often thus remaining painful forever like an unhealed bruise. Even when she acts at her meanest by driving away those around her (and partly also the audience), there seems to be an understanding in the way she is played by the actress that these actions stem from pain and self-preservation.
This role may be challenging even for seasoned performers but this multi-layered figure was brilliantly brought to life by Park who was acting for the first time in “Chou’s “Return To Seoul.” The scowls belong to Freddie; so do defensive postures together with mischievous tendencies aimed at causing little disturbances every now and then. As years go by within the film so does Park’s portrayal grow older subtly yet not enough for us lose touch with our girl who poured herself some soju while we were meeting her.
With time Freddie starts moving into places where she didn’t feel comfortable before. For sometime Seoul becomes her home; later it turns into just another stopover during business trips. Her bosses call her a “Trojan Horse” due to ability move between countries but somehow there still lingers feeling throughout this movie that indeed she might be woman without any place called home Chou’s Return To Seoul uneasy inspection about homesickness after losing one’s own city follows flawed heroine on emotional journey towards finding oneself as whole being.
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