Return to Seoul
After 25 years, Freddie has returned to South Korea on a whim. This is her first time back in her birthplace since being adopted by her French parents. She doesn’t have a reason for visiting or any ties to her Korean heritage. Her spontaneity leads her out for drinks with some friends, where she exhibits her lack of knowledge of Korean customs and the language as she pours her own drink and can’t understand the scattered groups she invites into one large group for a night of drinking. On the outside, she looks like she belongs, but she knows nothing about her birthplace, she was born there but it is not home to her. With no actual plans, it is suggested to Freddie that she should find her birth parents leading her to an adoption agency. This purposeless trip turns into an exploration of a fractured identity. Writer Davy Chou constructs an intimate coming-of-age narrative about how our pasts stick with us no matter how much we repress them.
The adoption agency leads her to meet her biological father who now has his own family but shows deep regret for letting Freddie go. Freddie puts up a barrier against her father’s desire to have a second chance with her moving back “home” so they can get to know each other. Even though she doesn’t take his idea seriously she finds comfort in learning where she comes from that sticks with her throughout the entire film.
The script is structured into four different visits to Korea as Freddie searchs for something she can’t find. Each time Freddie is a completely different person on the outside, changing her style and job. But the outside appearances she uses as a defense mechanism differ from the vulnerability she carries inside. She knows that however many times she tries to reinvent herself she will always be the adopted girl that moved to France. In Park Ji-Min’s first role, she gives a complex performance in each variation of Freddie perfectly balancing her inside and outside desires. Park utilizes a lot of nonverbal acting to communicate her feelings to the audience as they follow her evolution in self-discovery.
One of the visits is to celebrate her 27 birthday. She possesses a self-destructive nature as she ignores another year of her life being complete. Her behavior suggests a regret for not taking up her father’s offer and wasting two years she can no longer get back. Freddie’s behavior throughout the film suggests that she has had multiple start overs in her life to the point that it seems like a survival tactic to keep people from getting too close. She is somewhere that is home that she doesn’t see as home, so she has to try to find a place for herself in her fractured identity of being a Korean-born French woman.
Return to Seoul is clever in showing how many lives one person can live throughout one life. This idea is shown through many characters throughout the film. Freddie’s birth father explains to her how he and her mother were different people when they gave her up all those years ago. This is a painful decision both of them live with even though they have changed since then. By the end of the film, the Freddie we have spent two hours with has completely changed from who we first met at the beginning of the film.
Cinematographer Thomas Favel presents an alluring, beautiful Korea in multiple forms. From the dark bedrooms to the clubs, Favel photographs Korea in a way that clearly lays out why Freddie is infatuated to this place. Since there are multiple time jumps, the editing and cinematography are perfectly in sync to maintain a common thread and linear timeline that is easy to follow along Freddie’s journey.
Return to Seoul is a mesmerizing film about fractured identity featuring a versatile performance from Park and a layered script from Chou.