‘Return to Seoul’ Captures the Corrosive Angst of Not Belonging

This is also, in part, why she quickly begins to feel like an outsider, much as she does back in France, despite being legally and culturally French. To her new Korean friends, she “doesn’t look French,” and their only cultural context for her background is Paris Baguette, a Korean bakery chain. Very soon into these conversations, she decides to run with their exoticizing gaze—why fight the inevitable?—and in turn, she imposes upon them a rowdy sense of emotional openness to which they aren’t accustomed, at least in public. All of this unfolds in the opening 15 or 20 minutes, and while it initially seems like the film is establishing a simplistic cultural binary—the kind of culture clash between loud-and-proud Western individualism and polite, restrained Eastern collectivism often seen in such stories—it deftly lays the foundation for who Freddie is at this moment in time (and the specific ways she avoids confronting her feelings, even if it inconveniences others), right before her life is about to change.

Freddie’s interactions from this point on—with the adoption agency, and eventually, with her birth father and his family—are strained and short-tempered. Tena accompanies Freddie to her birth family’s village to help them interact the first time they meet. It’s an awkward, repressed reunion filled with lengthy silences, as Freddie and her bio-dad—for all intents and purposes, a stranger—wait for Tena to translate, a tension that’s made all the more palpable for the audience whenever Tena takes liberties to soften the blow. Both the Korean and French dialogue are subtitled for English-speaking viewers, who, like Tena, have an informational advantage over the other characters. During these scenes, Chou’s camera captures not only the seething, labyrinthine emotions Freddie is forced to process as she confronts her abandonment, but the concern on Tena’s face as someone tasked with the responsibility of holding all the cards. When Freddie’s accusations are too harsh, or her birth family’s confessions and apologies are too patronizing (or too culturally demanding; upon learning she’s single, they offer to help her marry a local man), Tena makes the decision to mis-translate, and soften the conversational edges, to protect both parties.

However,  Chou still captures—on Freddie’s and her birth father’s faces—the unnervingly pregnant pauses between each interaction, which speak far louder than words. The only language that matters here is silent, stewing anticipation. These silences only grow longer and more charged when Freddie meets with her birth father and his family (her aunt, her grandmother, and her two half-sisters) without Tena’s presence as a buffer, scenes which rely on Freddie and her aunt’s broken bits of English to get messages across, lengthening the lulls even further as the words are slowly interpreted back and forth. After a while, each pause in the conversation becomes a held breath, and the mere process of trying to communicate soon feels like being trapped in suspended animation. Chou holds relentlessly on these moments, refusing to cut away; the world itself stands still, as Freddie anticipates some ostensibly “correct” apology that may never form. How could it, when she has no idea what words, if any, would help mend her fractured sense of self?

Freddie’s birth father, a quiet man with a taste for alcohol, is deeply regretful for abandoning her as a baby (her birth mother, with whom he’s estranged, is yet to reply to the agency), and he’s eager to make amends, but Freddie doesn’t know how to respond to him. Even if she had the words, she wouldn’t know how to get them across, given their cultural barriers. So, her only refuge is her long-gestating anger—a language she knows her birth family will recognize and understand.

The way Park conveys long-buried pain with little more than fleeting glances is the kind of skill no drama school can teach.

As she travels back and forth between Seoul and her father’s rural township, she begins to feel unmoored from her racial and cultural identity. In the process, she becomes more corrosive towards Tena and the other well-meaning people around her. She has no other outlet for the pain caused by these festering wounds—which have never healed, and which have now been opened even further—so her only recourse is to let loose all the ugliness and unpleasantness she feels inside. From a performance standpoint, it’s an emotional high-wire act, which makes it all the more shocking that this is Park’s first on-screen role. Her character is brimming with anger even in her gentler and more mischievous moments, or at times when her eyes are listlessly searching for something on which to fixate—perhaps she’s looking for some kind of grounding. The way Park conveys long-buried pain with little more than fleeting glances is the kind of skill no drama school can teach. It’s a deeply felt, deeply lived-in performance, rich with the kind of emotional details that often fall through the cracks. When Freddie finally explodes, whether by acting unkindly, or by distracting herself with impromptu music and dance—resulting, at one point, in a particularly jagged, jerky and enrapturing routine set to Francesco Malaguti’s “L'Inutilità” that arrives like freight train—it feels like witnessing the worst parts of someone you love, exposed for all the world to see.

Chou conceived of the story after watching a friend, a French Korean adoptee, have similar experiences more than a decade ago. But it was in meeting Park—a visual artist with no acting experience, who immigrated to France at the age of 8—that he was able to flesh out many of its nuances, including her power dynamics with the various men in her life. In reclaiming what she perceives as rejection by her birth family, and a lifelong sense of powerlessness, she practically manipulates everyone around her if it means regaining some semblance of control. The movie’s initial scenes, in which she briefly storms through the lives of strangers in bars, are but a glimpse at the haunting emotional depths to which she eventually sinks, as the film takes unexpected turns and jumps ahead several years at a time.

Something Chou and Park seem to intimately understand is that the identities we construct for ourselves are never built alone, even if we take refuge in solitude.

Park’s blistering sense of present-ness—as she embodies an impulsive, irascible 25-year-old Freddie—is put to the test when she’s forced to trace Freddie’s uneasy evolution as well, a challenge the novice French actress faces with the kind of bravery even seasoned thespians might not conjure. Her conception of character could so easily have been simpler, linear, and more didactic—an A-to-B journey, in which she “improves” along tidy emotional broad strokes. Instead, it’s informed by Freddie’s resentment towards others, and her (dis)comfort with herself, a generous give-and-take that works in tandem with the larger world created by Chou. As time goes by, everything from Freddie’s temperament to her tone of voice is informed by where she’s been in the intervening years, who she’s been around, and her proximity to the various characters we meet throughout the film. It’s reflected not only in what she wears, or in her makeup, but how she carries herself. Something Chou and Park seem to intimately understand is that the identities we construct for ourselves are never built alone, even if we take refuge in solitude. The film’s former English title, when it played at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, was All The People I’ll Never Be, and Park expertly captures that tragic sense of time lost, and of infinite possibility.

Even Freddie’s callousness evolves as the years go by, going from outright rage to simmering whispers. It’s terrifying to witness—not because Freddie is an inherently scary presence, but because Park is so open and vulnerable, towards the camera, even when Freddie is guarded and withholding towards the people around her. Watching her navigate simple, everyday conversations is no less than being forced to witness someone slowly sliding into a pit of self-destruction, as she pushes people away.

Return to Seoul is the kind of film that asks an enormous question—“What does it take to be happy?”—and the answers it arrives at are anything but simple.

Eventually, there does exist some sense of hope and closure on the horizon, which Chou and cinematographer Thomas Favel hint at spiritually, rather than literally, by capturing a sense of space and openness around Freddie, through an increasing use of comfortable wide shots as the story unfolds—a far cry from the claustrophobic introductory scenes set mostly in bars. Though in keeping with the rest of the movie, even closure arrives in unexpected fashion, and Chou puts Freddie (and the audience) through the wringer before it ever becomes a possibility. Return to Seoul is the kind of film that asks an enormous question—“What does it take to be happy?”—and the answers it arrives at are anything but simple. The harrowing journey towards finding them captures feelings which are seldom expressed in words, like what it feels like to be dislodged from your own identity, and what it feels like to be a tourist everywhere you go, even in places (and with people) that ought to feel like home.