'Return To Seoul' Is A Funny, Melancholy Film That Will Surprise You Start To Finish
In the great novel As the Wanderer in the Night, Italo Calvino makes a curious list of different kinds of books. One of them is called "Books read before writing." This means that they are so predictable that you know every shot in advance. The same genre thrives in films, many times it feels like I'm watching a story I've seen all my life.
That's why I was impressed with Return to Seoul , a funny, melancholic and music-laden film that surprised me from start to finish. Written and directed by French Cambodian director Davy Chow, the film begins as a sentimental story about a young woman searching for her roots. But it quickly becomes clear that we are seeing something stranger and more powerful.
Actress Park Ji Min plays Frederick for the first time "Freddie" Benoist who was sent to France from South Korea as a child and raised by a white French couple. At 25, Freddie feels French - he doesn't speak Korean - and a photo of his mother is all he knows about Korea. But his life takes a strange turn when a typhoon changes his travel plans in the middle of the road and he ends up in Seoul. She doesn't quite understand what she's going to do there, except hang out with headphones, drink too much and hang out with cute strangers.
Freddie is not looking for his Korean ancestry. But many people he knows in Korea want just that. Like they wanted him to play the hero of a gritty immigrant drama about coming to terms with his family's past. And since Freddie is aimless, he ends up in an adoption agency that sent him (and dozens of other Korean children) to the West. And this agency connects her with her alcoholic biological father, a touching and absurd figure, beautifully played by Oh Kwang Rok, who wants to move in with his family. Their first meeting, consisting of a crying grandmother and an aunt who haphazardly translates the conversation, is a triumph of embarrassment.
Although his father yearns for reconciliation, Freddie is torn as hell, almost passionate. Rejection is innate, it prevents people from telling them what to do. He first drinks with two attractive young Koreans who speak French. As he begins to pour himself a glass of soju, he is stopped and told that spilling the drink is considered an insult to friends in Korea. Noticing this, he immediately filled a glass of soju and gulped it down.
The rest of the movie plays out similarly: Freddie doesn't quite do what we or the people around him expect. With his shifting palette and sharp eye, Zhou's style respects his rebellious nature. Instead of a neat narrative of epiphanies, "Return to Seoul" spans eight years of a series of sudden and unpredictable episodes. Along the way, Freddie meets an elderly French prostitute, gets a job selling guns and reluctantly searches for his biological mother.
Freddie is clearly searching for his identity, but neither he nor the film defines identity in terms of race, nationality or family; Zhou, himself a cultural outsider, believes that the diversity of life experiences is too great to capture. Although he has nothing to do with Korea, Chow is imaginative and empathetic and clearly understands where Freddie is coming from. He's stuck in a life of turmoil and struggling to figure out who he is, even if you could call me that. Cutting her hair or starting a relationship with a new man, she keeps reinventing herself.
A story like this can easily disappoint due to its incompleteness, but I was impressed by Puck's great performance as Freddie and even more surprised that he had never acted before. Wow, he has a presence! Chow's camera carefully examines his features, there is always something deep, wild and incomprehensible in them. Director Claire Denis, whose work is sometimes referenced in this film, noted that Park seemed to oppose Zhou's camera. He's right, and Puck's stamina makes the film unique and mysterious. In fact, her work here is more compelling than any of this year's Oscar nominees for acting.
Jean-Luc-Godard said cinema is a girl and a gun. The stellar movie Return to Seoul proves that sometimes you don't even need a gun.
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