Return to Seoul | Davy Chou
© Aurora Films, Courtesy of Pictures Classics
Written by Michael Galati
Copy Edited by Keenan Haggen
Photo Edited by Olivia Castillo
To call Return to Seoul a coming-of-age movie would be a misclassification. It’s not a movie that comes to any kind of end, let alone adulthood, the vague and arbitrary state of someone having “grown up.” Instead, it’s a movie that showcases discovering the many layers of self we contain, adorned by the constant identity pivots, whirlwinds of life, and long nights accompanied by empty soju bottles, bright epileptic lights, deep techno music, and all.
The film was written and directed by Davy Chou and stars Park Jin-min as a 25-year-old French adoptee named Frédérique (Freddie) Benoît who searches, stops searching for, and resumes searching for her biological parents in South Korea. Over eight years, we see Freddie live a million lives: as a corporate consultant who lives her nights away in techno clubs; an arms seller who contradictorily replaces alcohol and meat for meditation; and a nomadic hiker, constantly weaving in and out of Seoul and the fabric of her biological family. But, as the film makes clear, the pivot is the point.
© Aurora Films, Courtesy of Pictures Classics
In a bar in the opening scene, Freddie asks her friends, “Do you know what sight-reading is?” They don’t. With a smirk, she explains that when you read a score for the first time, “You have to be able to analyze the music in one glance, evaluate the danger… and jump in.” After explaining, she asks her friends to look at people’s fear in the room. Everyone is sitting at separate tables. To her friend’s surprise, she pops another soju bottle, asks the other patrons to cheer with her, and, many soju bottles later, closes out the bar with all of them and sleeps with one of them twice. This analysis is Freddie’s guide for life: read the signs, take your fear with you, and jump in, even if what results is not according to plan because there is no plan.
Conveniently for Freddie, her life philosophy also allows her to leave such signs behind when they try to figure her out. At this same bar, her newfound friends say that the expat has an “ancient” Korean face as if she comes from a long line of native Koreans. At the adoption center, where she begins her search for her parents, she learns that her birth name is Yeon-hee, meaning “docile and joyous” in Korean. When her French boyfriend sees too much of her biological family, too close for comfort for Freddie, she tells him, “I could wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers.” Freddie reads the signs around her almost too well, and when she feels like she’s been figured out (or possibly wholly misread), she runs away.
© Aurora Films, Courtesy of Pictures Classics
But this break in how Freddie sees herself and how others see her and her inevitable escape propels the film forward like a tornado over flat land. Cinematographer Thomas Favel’s camera focuses on these moments of recognition and avoidance through incredible close-ups such that the character’s faces, often Freddie’s, take up more than half the screen, carefully washed in a beautiful backdrop of color. The camera catches the slightest shifts in expression, saying what Freddie cannot: as much as Freddie superficially rejects intimacy, these close-ups unmask her foundational desire for it.
Return to Seoul is about fear—not about overcoming fear, but living with it, avoiding it, sitting with it, and running head first into it just to avoid it again. It contemplates fears of loneliness, rejection, and acceptance. In one such scene, we see Freddie dancing to a song that repeats, “You can’t make it alone,” to a house beat. Freddie is smiling, but there’s that lingering question. In these tiny moments stretched ad infinitum, the film soars, and Park Ji-min tells us everything we need to know about her character.
