‘Seoul’ Searching
Davy Chou taps artist Park Ji-min for a meandering, intermittently affecting search for identity.
Return to Seoul
Director: Davy Chou • Writer: Davy Chou
Starring: Park Ji-min, Oh Kwang-rok, Choi Cho-woo, Guka Han, Kim Sun-young, Hur Ouk-sook, Yoann Zimmer, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Régine Vial Goldberg, Emeline Briffaud
France / Belgium / Germany / Cambodia • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong February 16 • IIB
Grade: B-
You know how when you don’t “get” something in a book or a movie, or you’ve never read the comic or played a game something is based on, but you “get” the series or movie you’re watching just fine? Like how, most recently, The Last of Us is so well adapted from its source material it doesn’t matter that the game is alien to you? By the same token you consume something where the central character is so awful – Tár comes to mind recently – or is grappling with something super-foreign to your life, yet you grok that central character just fine? Kind of like Michelle Yeoh’s immigrant mother in Everything Everywhere All At Once? That happens when the writing and filmmaking is strong enough to pull you in – into the world, the story, the psyche – keep you there, and make sure you never feel left out.
This is what Cambodian-French writer-director Davy Chou can’t quite do firmly enough in Return to Seoul (Retour à Séoul), a bloated, unfocused identity drama that follows a young Korean-French woman, gamely played by visual artist and first-time actor Park Ji-min, navigating Seoul on a search for her birth parents. Searching is in Chou’s blood, as evidenced by his debut film, the documentary Golden Slumbers, about lost, pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodian cinema. Return to Seoul starts strong, and Chou floats some pointed, timely concepts about nature vs nurture and identity politics through an entirely unlikeable woman, but ultimately its impact is diluted by its scattered focus. That said, it was nominated for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Award, so what do I know?
Korean. French. Awful
The first hour of two – which should really be 100 minutes – pivots on the truly awful Frédérique Benoît (Park, effortlessly naturalistic), or Freddie, an ethnically Korean, culturally French twentysomething visiting Seoul for the first time since being adopted away as an infant. The woman who runs the guest house she’s staying in, Tena (Han Guka), had a mother who was a French teacher, so the two become buddies, begining with a boisterous night of soju in a local restaurant, in which Freddie demonstrates just how French she really is.
Tena sparks something in Freddie when she points her to an agency that tracks down the biological parents of children adopted overseas. Before you know it they’ve found her boozy biological father with a drunk texting problem (veteran bit player Oh Kwang-rok), effusively grateful grandmother (Hur Ouk-sook), and an aunt who speaks a little English (Kim Sun-young, excellent) a couple of hours from Seoul in Gunsan. It would seem that she’s Yeon-hee, and the awkward visit to the coast starts an uneasy, eight-year exploration of Freddie’s Korean roots. We watch as she pops back to Daehan Minguk every few years, first as a Bauhaus cast-off working in “consulting” and cruising Tinder for older guys, like André (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), then as a (no shit) international arms dealer with a pliant fiancé, Maxime (Yoann Zimmer). The spectre of her birth mother (Choi Cho-woo) hovers over everything.
So what do I know? I’ll tell you what I know: Return to Seoul is the kind of film that gets showered with accolades like “profound” and “devastating” and “powerful” even though it’s narratively messy and leans into a few too many single-girl-trying-to-find-herself tropes (dancing alone in bar with onlookers, anyone?). Despite how much the stress of displacement resonates, and the universal need for clear identity, Return to Seoul never really connects in a way that lets us understand Freddie. It does a great job of showing off how she’s caught between cultures, and it’s great when it explores how each family exerts an almost proprietary hold on Freddie – Yeon-hee only in Gunsan. And Chou, and Park in particular, should be commended for making her thorny and bitchy and reactionary, and keeping herself at a remove. It’s a far more believable headspace than if she were all touchy-feely understanding and tolerant. Freddie is confused and vaguely angry and trying to parse how something as random – and to many, meaningless – as biology could have such an impact on her. Why should she be a sweetheart? But by padding out the second hour with Freddie/Yeon-hee’s various personae (we get it, she’s searching for identity) it loses its way and puts her at an even farther remove, one that can’t be overcome. — DEK