Found in Trans­la­tion: On Return to Seoul’s bit­ter­sweet depic­tion of communication

One of the great­est fears of my (admit­ted­ly fair­ly shel­tered) life involved a for­ma­tive trip to Tokyo. As is the cus­tom for such pri­mo vaca­tions, one tends to book ear­ly in the hope of sav­ing a few yen in the process. As such, this left me with six months until my depar­ture date.

Instead of eager antic­i­pa­tion and a sense of swelling excite­ment, the over­whelm­ing mind­set I expe­ri­enced dur­ing that half-year wait was one of extreme trep­i­da­tion and anx­i­ety. That wasn’t in any way relat­ed to my desire for adven­ture and want­i­ng to vis­it this deeply allur­ing city on the oth­er side of the globe – it was more to do with a fear of being, as the title of the movie goes, lost in trans­la­tion. That I would arrive at the air­port, and the cul­ture would be so dis­tant to me, that I would bare­ly be able to make it to the hotel.

I wish Davy Chou had made Return to Seoul 15 years ago, as it would’ve pro­vid­ed a balm for my pre-flight jit­ters. Even though it is cen­tred around anoth­er major South-East Asian cap­i­tal city, it is a film which traf­fics in the idea that, by hook or by crook, peo­ple some­how man­age to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er despite lan­guage bar­ri­ers or any per­ceived cul­tur­al chasms.

Its cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist, Park Ji-min’s tena­cious and exu­ber­ant Fred­die, was born in Korea, but was adopt­ed by French par­ents and received what appears to be a fair­ly afflu­ent upbring­ing in Paris. She’s a native French speak­er, and due to her under­stand­able appre­hen­sion to return to her birth coun­try, is not able to con­verse in Korean. 

And yet, in the film’s open­ing chap­ter, she is in Seoul, dom­i­nat­ing the con­ver­sa­tion in a bustling bar with the kind­ly Tena (Guka Han) assist­ing her with trans­la­tion. With her nat­ur­al charis­ma and allure, a group of semi-soused guys are swift­ly eat­ing out of the palm of her hand, and the sequence sets out one of the film’s the­mat­ic stalls: that if peo­ple see val­ue in mak­ing a con­nec­tion with anoth­er, they will refuse to allow lan­guage to inhib­it their efforts. 

Maybe my fear of going to Japan was a prod­uct of the sto­ry­telling con­ven­tions of pre­vi­ous decades which had sought to exoti­cise and dis­tance any place that isn’t the west in the name of dra­mat­ic intrigue. All types and gen­res and film have tra­di­tion­al­ly trad­ed in such tac­tics, from titles as tonal­ly and styl­is­ti­cal­ly dis­tanced as 1967 James Bond caper, You Only Live Twice, to Miyazaki’s charm­ing witch-in-the-city rite of pas­sage movie, Kiki’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice, and some more tact­ful­ly than others.

Yet there are more recent, more per­ti­nent exam­ples of a sub-genre of movies that explore this notion of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tran­scend­ing the lim­its of lan­guage. The sto­ry of Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed won­der, Dri­ve My Car, by Japan­ese direc­tor Ryusuke Ham­aguchi, orbits around a pro­duc­tion of Chekov’s ​‘Uncle Vanya’ in which cast mem­bers are drawn from dif­fer­ent locales and the essen­tial pow­er of the play goes undimmed. Lee Issac Chung’s Minari, too, doc­u­ments the efforts of a Kore­an expat fam­i­ly try­ing their hard­est to build a farm in Amer­i­ca, despite their extreme cul­tur­al dis­con­nect from the land and the peo­ple. Lulu Wang’s bit­ter­sweet The Farewell – which per­haps shares the most DNA with Return to Seoul – sees a Chi­nese-Amer­i­can woman return­ing ​“home” in an attempt to keep her cul­tur­al roots well watered.

In Return to Seoul, it’s ener­vat­ing to see Fred­die take such charge and ques­tion this notion that lone­li­ness and alien­ation should be our default set­ting when we’re out of our geo­graph­i­cal com­fort zone. Chou then caps things off by hav­ing Fred­die hump and dump one of the drool­ing onlookers.

Lat­er in the film, Fred­die makes the deci­sion to spend this small win­dow she has in Seoul to head to the adop­tion agency that processed her case and see if there’s any way she could con­nect to her birth par­ents. Her estranged bio­log­i­cal father takes the bait, and her vis­it with him instant­ly proves uncom­fort­able, even if she’s able to chalk it up to a loss of nuance in their communication. 

There’s some­thing quite rad­i­cal about hav­ing a char­ac­ter who has an innate feel­ing that this poten­tial­ly fraught moment of belat­ed recon­nec­tion was per­haps not the best idea she had ever made. Fred­die is an empow­er­ing pres­ence, even though she is most def­i­nite­ly not what some might call a ​“moral­ly pure” character. 

She takes a giant leap across the lan­guage bar­ri­er in a way that demon­strates the pos­si­bil­i­ties of such endeav­ours, even if they don’t result in unal­loyed hap­pi­ness. The les­son to my more youth­ful self is, don’t wor­ry that peo­ple won’t under­stand you, wor­ry that peo­ple might think you’re a dick when they do.

Return to Seoul is released in UK and Irish cin­e­mas Fri­day, May 5, and streams exclu­sive­ly on MUBI from July 7. Find screen­ings and book tick­ets here: mubi​.com/​r​e​t​u​r​n​t​o​seoul