Return to Seoul

There is a roman­ti­cism around wan­der­lust which doesn’t always make sense. The idea of aim­less­ly trav­el­ling and tak­ing in for­eign cul­tures, cus­toms and flavours is nice in the­o­ry, but what if you lose your­self in the process? Or start­ed this whole thing hop­ing to find a way out, or back into your­self, but with no luck?

Fred­die (Park Ji-Min) hasn’t been lucky for a while. The spiky young French woman of Kore­an her­itage at the heart of Davy Chou’s dynam­ic Return to Seoul takes two weeks off work to go to South Korea for the first time, quick­ly told her face is like a ​“long­time Kore­an” and her birth name, Yeon-hee, means ​“docile and joy­ful”. Noth­ing makes sense, but she has to live with it after the hol­i­day is over.

What begins as an acci­den­tal fort­night of soul-search­ing shifts into some­thing broad­er, more ambi­tious in scope and some­what haunt­ing in Chou’s third fea­ture. Fred­die is quick­ly, acci­den­tal­ly, told she is able to seek out her bio­log­i­cal par­ents at an adop­tion agency, but under strict con­di­tions. A dilem­ma is thrown up: is she being lied to? Does trans­la­tion (Fred­die speaks lit­tle Kore­an, rely­ing on friends to trans­late into French) cap­ture all the nuance she needs? What if she’s bet­ter off alone?

Chou crafts a fas­ci­nat­ing por­trait of a bro­ken fam­i­ly and the frus­trat­ed, frac­tured iden­ti­ties in his remark­able sto­ry that refus­es to paint Fred­die as either vic­tim or a hero, with­out turn­ing her into some­body ful­ly despi­ca­ble either. She can be all of it: lone­ly and upset; dom­i­neer­ing and threat­en­ing; and maybe a lit­tle rude. She hates her birth­day, sells mis­siles, could wipe any­body from her life with a snap of her fin­gers. The nuances of Park’s first-ever screen per­for­mance are staggering.

By the time Fred­die does meet her estranged moth­er, where a lot of film­mak­ers might let slip a bit of melo­dra­ma sludge to sweet­en things, Chou holds back. It’s not cru­el, but nev­er delud­ed either. It’s unset­tling how much this jour­ney defies con­ven­tion – two weeks takes up half the film, and sud­den­ly it’s sev­en years lat­er where every­thing has changed, yet so lit­tle has actu­al­ly hap­pened. Ten­sion and inti­ma­cy go hand in hand: gen­tly stroking a bolt insert­ed beneath a col­lar­bone is the clos­est thing a father will get to show­ing his daugh­ter affec­tion. An email will bounce. She will con­tin­ue to hike, to play piano, be alone.

Vivid colours and a tetchy, vibrant score buoy the film along as it twists and turns through­out Freddie’s life, nev­er loos­en­ing its grip on the stub­born defen­sive­ness that colours her iden­ti­ty. The film isn’t incon­clu­sive but its time and con­ti­nent-sweep­ing struc­ture is any­thing but con­ven­tion­al: and that’s what makes the mer­cu­r­ial Return to Seoul, in the end, so remarkable.

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

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