A woman born in South Korea but then raised in France returns to the land of her birth to look up her birth parents. And that’s the basic plot outline of Return to Seoul, a fictional reworking of the true story of Korean-born, France-raised Laure Badufle, who wrote this movie with director Davy Chou.
This is a film that knows very well that there’s are a welter of genealogy-adjacent TV shows out there with titles like Long Lost Family. Who Do You Think You Are?, the globally most successful of them has been around for 20 years and exists in all sorts of iterations, under all sorts of titles, acquainting people with their ancestors, connecting them up with family they didn’t know they had and often providing a backstory that puts their lives in context.
And so instead of doing that all over again, in fictional form, Chou and Badufle gives us a kind of anti-Long Lost Family/Who Do You Think You Are? There is little in the way of sleuthing in Return to Seoul, or poring over old records with kindly librarians in dusty archives. As for the cathartic emotional release that is the whole point of shows like these, Chou and Badufle withhold on that front to the point where it almost becomes cruel.
Instead, in what looks at first like a tic but ends up paying huge dividends, Chou puts his repeatedly camera on the face of his star, Park Ji-min, and leaves it there, leaves it there, leaves it there… for the longest time. Almost nothing in terms of emotions flickers there. What is Frédérique, aka Freddie, thinking? As she arrives at a hostel, makes friends with first one person then another, visits an adoption agency and sets in train a process that playS out in two separate ways – the problematical father (easy but needy) and the unreachable mother (difficult and still not contacted years down the line) – there’s a wall between us and Freddie’s emotional hinterland.
Nor is Freddie particularly likeable. Punchy, go-getting and with an easy smile, she’s also selfish, aggressive and often withdrawn, demanding too. On her first night in Seoul she crosses all sorts of social boundaries, some petty others not, and ends up drunk in bed with a guy from a restaurant. Did we have sex, she wonders the next morning, grimly hungover. If not, let’s do it now. He, unsurprisingly, falls quite hard for her, and she responds by treating him abysmally.
Freddie treats a lot of people fairly badly. Tena (Guka Han), the French-speaking hostel receptionist who acts as a translator. Her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok), when she eventually meets him – and she’s also fairly cool towards the family he’s subsequently had, even though they are as nice as pie to her, when they don’t have to be.
Freddie also, really rubbing in that this is not – definitively NOT – in any way like a TV show in which nice people find out something about themselves, later meets a middle-aged arms dealer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, a specialist in morally dubious characters), sleeps with him just because and then gets co-opted into the weapons business. Emotional remoteness being a useful character trait in those selling death.
Set-up and pay-off. Foreplay and orgasm. Chou plays the longest game and somewhere around halfway through, when he abandons his camera-on-the-face technique for a while, his film momentarily wobbles, before getting itself back together for the jog into the home straight, followed by a deserved victory lap.
Like Freddie, this is an undemonstrative movie, coolly shot, gently paced, with quiet music, muted colours, performances that never shout or hector. Park Ji-min is a first time actor and really delivers the goods as Freddie, with a performance of infinitesimal suggestion and micro reaction. Chou forces us to read her face. And, as if watching a poker player trying to find their “tell”, there is a surprising amount to read there, once sufficient re-calibration has taken effect.
“I’m French now,” says Freddie at one point, and there is some investigation of notions of ethnicity and whether there is an essentialising something in us all. But it’s more sideshow than main event. That is Freddie. Or more specifically Freddie’s face.
Return to Seoul – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
