‘Return To Seoul Is One Of The Best IdentityCrisis Movies Ever
Do you know what sight reading is ? the young woman asks her tablemates. None of them know, he explains: when you see the score for the first time, "you have to be able to analyze the music at a glance, assess the danger... and enter." The key is to be able to read the signs, he adds. So it is in music and in life.
His name is Frederick (Park Ji Min), although everyone calls him Freddie. He is of South Korean origin but only speaks French. As a child, Freddie was adopted by a couple living in the French countryside. Freddie was brought up in a Western way. He came to Seoul for a two-week visit to reunite with his parents. However, tonight he reads the signs at the barbecue where he had dinner on his first evening in town, and apparently they tell him to grab a bottle of soju and take himself, his new friends, and two other random customers to the restaurant. Restaurant Another table. dinner . The party is a kind of emotional activity that ends the evening on a battlefield of empty bottles, rotting bodies, and random fights. You know, the type that usually defines someone in their twenties who is still wondering who they want to be. Or maybe a lost soul who doesn't know when, where or how to find her.
It’s common knowledge that 2022 is a big year for actors – your next generation of scream queens (watching you Mia Goth and Keke Palmer) raising the bar for drama and comedy (we’re revisiting this) alongside you Danielle Deadwyler and Lashana Lynch. Stephanie Hu and Carrie Condon), your Clash of the Titans nominees (whether Cate Blanchett or Michelle Yeoh wins an Oscar next month, we're all winners). However, it was a slick canon of the year contender, creating a quiet monsoon that will stay with you months after watching. It doesn't matter if it's a neophyte.
Having managed to qualify after the festival at the end of 2022 - he played in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes - the return to Seoul was canceled for the first time due to normal winter weather. Several Oscar laps and more. Now that it's finally out in theaters, you can see that it not only deserves your attention, but it deserves to be one of the best identity crisis movies out there. The thought that visual artist Park Ji Min never starred in this (!) film by writer-director Davey Chou is frankly mind-boggling, as is everything else he has done on screen. The story of a young woman delving into her past for answers has much to offer. He is 99% responsible for this.
Chow lacks the vision, the artistic flair, or even a few liters of his own plasma to create a portrait of a man in this masterful and unusual stream of portraits. A French-Cambodian filmmaker who made his documentary debut (his first film Golden Dreams in 2011 is a love letter to Cambodian cinema and an incomparable lesson in Cambodian cinema), he knows how to put things in front of the camera and make it feel like it was about him. Also, the viewer discovers something, even collects a cinematic style. Chow is easily aware of his influence, so you might think of Claire Danes and the medieval Wong Karwai from Freddy's Neon Adventures (an idea only reinforced by Thomas Favell's great cinematography) or perhaps the male Fe Ming . - Ira Goddard, looking at her young hero, does not think to pay tribute to these writers. The same applies to its staff, who know how to use landmarks as a means rather than an end; It's good, for example, that composers Jeremy Arkash and Christophe Musset took raw beats from the gothic Bauhaus musical The Dead Bella Lugosi and reworked them for Freddie's hedonistic excursion.
However , it is the park that makes returning to Seoul so exciting . Piloting a shotgun with his character trying to connect with his biological mother and father, you will witness Freddy's desperation, desperate tactics and confusion when he returns. Her mother initially refused to contact the adoption agency; Freddie's fixative father, played by veteran South Korean actor Oh Kwang Rok, appears emotionally depressed and overly emotional in the presence of his son, who has spent years wondering what happened to him. When asked when he will return, Freddie says that he does not speak the language, has no idea about the culture, and besides, he is French. A phone call from his mother revealed that the entire trip was a joke. Home is not the country in which he is now, and not the country to which he left to come. Most of the time, Chow focuses the lens on Pak's face, watching him perform each trick. And because he literally rode those emotional waves in real time, Freddie seems to gradually fill in the gaps with close-ups.
Or maybe it's better to say "discovering" where these places start and end. Most filmmakers would stop at the end of this first journey, leaving Freddie frustrated by the lack of a reunion, a palpable sense of displacement, and a void he feels will never be filled properly. Filled with the piercing buzz of youth, restlessness and the excruciating pain of feeling rootless, this story is enough to make it a rich story.
However, Chow and Park continued to work, and the deadline for their return to Seoul kept moving forward. A few years later, Freddie returned to South Korea, this time as a consultant to an arms dealer. She looks like a vamp with dark lipstick, arranges expensive dinners with a French arms dealer (Louis-do de Lanxing) and goes clubbing for hours with her tattoo artist boyfriend (Lim Cheong-hyung). He later became a somewhat more mature corporate worker, ditching meat and drink in favor of meditation. Still later, she travels with a pixie cut. Boys come and go. Things are better with his father and Freddie's large family. Jumping forward corresponds to stepping back. The transition line descends into the park, allowing us to observe progression, regression and the fragile foundation on which everything rests. Drama is cinema . Hit it: performance in the park, cum .
Chou said the film is not autobiographical, as is Park's story, although she was born in Korea and raised in France. However, the two create something very personal and bring to life this young woman's journey of self-discovery. It takes a long way to get to the point where you can write "I think I'm happy" without even guaranteeing eternal happiness. And the moment of "reading the signs" by the director-actor duo is so awe inspiring that it makes you wonder, even before the credits roll, that you've come all the way.
