There’s a subtle but significant metaphor underpinning the events of Return to Seoul, an immersive and affecting fish-out-of-water drama written and directed by Davy Chou. While negotiating the cultural minefields of her native Seoul, a young French woman of Korean descent, Freddie (Park Ji-min), mentions her background as a musician and the skill of sight-reading. The technique requires a quick assessment of the score and its potential dangers, followed by a fearless plunge. These are words that Freddie lives by, at least as much as we see in the chapters of her experiences in the enigmatic country of her birth where she uncovers as much about herself as about the parents who gave her up for adoption. Her story is a long arc, covering the better part of a decade, but that comment about sight-reading informs all of her character’s choices before finally landing in the closing moments.
We first encounter Freddie at a cafe in Seoul with a pair of acquaintances who are showing her the city and attempting to teach her a bit about Korean culture and customs. Freddie, however, is not interested in doing much learning. While her physiognomy is classically Korean, her personality is all French. Her accent, facial expressions and general attitude of blasé sophistication all telegraph Parisian ennui, while her Korean hosts use their workmanlike French to try to connect with her. We gather that she came to Seoul on a whim, with no intention of hunting down the biological parents who turned her over to an adoption agency. But we also see the calculation in her eyes as she improvises her approach to the unfamiliar world she finds herself in.
Park’s performance is a marvel of understatement and interiority. In many scenes, she says very little but communicates much. Having grown up free from the Confucian traditions that animate much of the patterns of socialization in Korea, she breaks taboos left and right, to the shock and dismay of her hosts. Pouring her own soju, inviting herself to drink with a table full of young men, dancing solo when the music strikes her fancy–Freddie is an engine of free will, with the soul of a wrecking ball. When she finally does embark on the journey of connecting with her biological parents, it becomes clear that her impetuousness is a product of the rootlessness she feels.
Chou’s script was adapted from the real story of a young woman’s difficult search for her own parents, and the director’s style preserves a sense of documentary realism. There are many long takes, the camera lingering on Freddie’s subtly shifting expressions even as action and dialogue take place around her. French and Korean commingle with occasional detours into rudimentary English. The story skips ahead by chunks, first two years, then five more, each time showing Freddie with a different hair style and a new set of confederates as she embeds herself more deeply in Seoul’s culture and counterculture. Encounters with her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok) prove initially disappointing but then shift in tenor as Freddie grows more aware of the societal forces that doomed her parents’ union. And, because she’s European to the core, she finds herself jumping into a May-December hookup with a French businessman (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) who’s old enough to be her father.
While key moments linger and unfold with granular detail, other elements of the story leap ahead without fuss. Her friends and lovers from the first act vanish without mention, and we soon discover that the French lover, an arms dealer, has brought Freddie into the business where she has become a successful dealer herself. She frames this as a kind of cosmic equation: returning to her native South Korea to defend it from the North. To yet another lover, Maxime (Yoann Zimmer), she says ominously, “I could make you disappear with a snap of my fingers.” In the next scene, he’s gone without a trace.
The character of the film itself mimics the mindset of its protagonist: restless, rootless, investigating the past for meaning but uninterested in tradition or decorum. It’s one of several recent films to feature a scene of emotional climax where the protagonist wordlessly dances, alone, to a synthy ’80s tune as an expression of liberation. But the deeper resonance with Freddie’s abandoned musical history is preserved for the final scene, where she returns to the act of sight-reading as if coming home. She’s come a long way, and she still might not know who she is, but she’s gotten frighteningly good at navigating unfamiliar terrain without fear.
Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
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