Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Petr Navovy | Film | January 24, 2024
This must be the largest gap between a film’s release and its review that we’ve ever had here on the site. Certainly, for any review that I’ve ever written. The film whose English language title would eventually end up being Return to Seoul premiered all the way back in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival under the initial English title, All the People I’ll Never Be (it was Retour à Séoul in its native French, so it made sense to circle back). Return to Seoul would then be released in a staggered fashion around the world at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. So by even the most generous of metrics, I’m at least a year late to the party here. But you know what, some things are worth waiting for, and Return to Seoul is definitely one of those things.
Only the second feature from Cambodian-French writer-director Davy Chou (Diamond Island), Return to Seoul stars French-Korean visual artist Park Ji-min in her debut role as Frédérique (Freddie), a headstrong young woman in her mid-twenties who travels spontaneously from her adopted France to the South Korean capital where she was born. Freddie’s birth parents put her up for adoption when she was a very young baby. She has never met them, or communicated with them. As far as we know, this is her first time in South Korea. The only link she has to that part of her life is a faded Polaroid of a baby in an adult’s arms. Freddie hasn’t travelled to Seoul on a quest to reconnect with her roots, however. Or at least that’s what she’d say, most likely giving you a withering look and a short, sharp verbal dressing down if you suggested as much—if she could even be bothered to deign you with the latter.
As someone who has also always lived with a psycho-geographical disconnect between their place of birth and later life (albeit not quite as dramatic as Freddie’s), this film spoke powerfully to me. Confronting the notion of divided cultural heritage and sense of belonging head-on, with Freddie a charging bull powered by oft-questionable decision making, it manages to be both unsparing and empathetic. It loves Freddie tremendously, despite and because of everything. Identifying with the protagonist is by no means a prerequisite for enjoyment, however, as Return to Seoul is a beguiling watch regardless, carefully constructed with a formal eye that belies the director’s relative inexperience even as it vibrates with the kind of life and possibility—of sheer film-making excitement—that can only come from that very same youth. It moves at a relaxed, languorous pace while maintaining an emotional urgency that’s at times almost nail-bitingly tense.
Chou and his cinematographer Thomas Favel (Gaz de France) bathe the screen in color and reveal a reverence for texture—skin, concrete, glass—that remains sensual even as it trades mostly in the blues and colder hues of Seoul. It could stand to tighten a few moments up, but overall this is a moving and very human film. Like the best stories, Return to Seoul understands that people contain multitudes, that in our quest for ourselves we don’t always do everything the most pragmatic way, and that can make us tough to like sometimes. Life’s not easy. The scars it leaves can last forever.
