Return to Seoul – first look review

The trait of impul­sive­ness often comes across poor­ly in movies. Who wants to see some flighty, uncon­strained free spir­it break­ing social con­tracts, or lav­ish­ing in per­son­al plea­sure at the expense of her less-enlight­ened cohorts? In his delight­ful, Almod­ó­var­i­an sec­ond fea­ture, Return to Seoul Be, French-Cam­bo­di­an direc­tor Davy Chou offers up a lead char­ac­ter who embraces her inner impul­sive­ness but with an invig­o­rat­ing sense of poise and trep­i­da­tion. There’s a lot of look­ing before leap­ing, but the leaps do even­tu­al­ly come, and each one is loaded with the poten­tial for both com­e­dy and tragedy.

We meet the for­ward and friend­ly Fred­die (Ji-Min Park), a frizzy-haired French woman holed up in a Kore­an hot pot joint, suck­ing back the sojus and chat­ting away in a mix of French and Eng­lish with her two din­ing com­pan­ions, one of whom becomes her de fac­to trans­la­tor. It’s not long before she’s tipsi­ly table-hop­ping and reveal­ing details of her upbring­ing to ran­dom clien­tele: that she was born in Korea, giv­en up for adop­tion and tak­en in by a French couple.

She nev­er har­boured the desire to dis­cov­er who her bio­log­i­cal par­ents were, and find­ing her­self in Seoul as the result of a logis­ti­cal sna­fu, decides that now is the time to pull back the rug on the truth behind her ear­ly years. She envis­ages that this impul­sive ges­ture will have lit­tle blow-back, and that she’ll sim­ply dis­cov­er the moment of dire straits that led her real folks to make this earth-shat­ter­ing deci­sion, and all will be karmi­cal­ly realigned.

In nar­ra­tive essence, the film is sim­ple but very effec­tive. Ini­tial­ly, Fred­die decides to doorstep the city’s biggest adop­tion agency, and with just a social secu­ri­ty num­ber writ­ten on the back of a pho­to­graph as proof of her iden­ti­ty, is able to get the ball rolling on the true nature of her genealog­i­cal roots. It’s a deli­cious set-up, par­tic­u­lar­ly as Frankie dis­plays hints of art­sy, debonair Euro­trash that stand her in cul­tur­al oppo­si­tion to most of the Kore­ans with whom she comes into contact.

Things don’t quite go to plan, and Chou han­dles the fall­back with a del­i­ca­cy that nev­er allows the mate­r­i­al to fall back on farce or gaudy melo­dra­ma. Frankie’s encoun­ters with her bio­log­i­cal father are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, as his extreme reac­tion to her arrival is a turn-off more for cul­tur­al than sen­ti­men­tal reasons.

He feels the needs to do any­thing in his pow­er to make amends for this ter­ri­ble – albeit, unavoid­able – deci­sion made in his youth, and though ini­tial­ly turned off by his inten­si­ty, Frankie does start to won­der if these rev­e­la­tions should be the cat­a­lyst for a new chap­ter in her identity.

The absence through­out is Frankie’s moth­er, who doesn’t respond to the let­ters sent out by the adop­tion agency. Her lack of pres­ence is what leads Frankie to pro­long her search, even, and the film sad­ly laps­es into the maudlin on its home stretch. Yet for the major­i­ty of the time, this is pre­ci­sion-engi­neered soap opera spun around a clutch of love­ly, sin­cere­ly engaged per­for­mances and a script that, from a small the­mat­ic ker­nel, devel­ops into some­thing rich and profound.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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