Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ji-Min PARK, OH Kwang-rok, Guka HAN, Louis-do De Lencquesaing, Yoann Zimmer
Intro:
… an intense drama that challenges the audience to empathise with a character who does not want sympathy.
“I could wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers” says Freddie (Ji-Min PARK) to her boyfriend Maxime (Yoann Zimmer) in the back of a taxi in Seoul. She does precisely that and from Freddie such behaviour isn’t surprising, it’s a pattern that the complex and angry young woman has been repeating for as long as the audience has seen her on the screen. It’s also one of the most honest moments in Davy Chou’s investigation into identity, Return to Seoul (originally titled All the People I’ll Never Be).
Freddie is a French woman aged 25 when we first meet her. She is of Korean descent and was adopted as an infant by a middle-class couple. A random wind brings her to Seoul when her flight to Tokyo is cancelled. She stands in a hotel studying the attendant Tena (Guka HAN), who she will soon draw into an intense friendship. Freddie is freewheeling her way across the globe; we don’t really know what she does, and we know even less about what she wants from life. Over the span of eight years, Freddie becomes different people but what remains is her dissatisfaction and a deep well of self-destruction.
Being in Seoul is not a “return home”, in fact that seems to be the last thing Freddie wants. As Tena and her friend probe her about being Korean, she resists them by insisting she is French. The resistance is more than words, she actively rejects what is seen as good manners and chaotically re-arranges the restaurant she’s in to create a party where she encourages strangers to drink large quantities of Soju. The strangers insist that she has an “ancestral Korean face,” and someone mentions the Hammond Adoption Center where Freddie can attempt to find her birth parents. Finding her birth parents was never part of her plans, yet in the following days, she finds herself in the center, presenting a polite worker with the only thing she has connecting her to Korea; a photograph of herself and a woman with a number on the back.
Freddie almost seems angry when the worker links her file to the number and gives her a copy of her adoption papers. She learns that her Korean name is Yeon-hee (meaning docile and joyful – two attributes that do not match her personality) and that the agency can send telegrams to her parents and if they respond, organise a meeting. Her father (OH Kwang-rok) gets in touch with her almost immediately, but because Freddie does not speak any Korean, she relies on the French speaking Tena to act as her translator and guide as she travels to her father’s home.
Freddie’s lack of Korean language means that she has to rely on Tena, and her father’s sister for communication. The meeting is awkward and her father’s palpable regret for giving her away becomes oppressive. He can’t understand why she won’t stay in Korea and live the life of a Korean woman. He has a new family that he wants to enfold her into, but Freddie does not want that. Her rejection of him is symbolised by a pair of ultra-feminine ballet flats that he buys for her, and she leaves in a park.
With only two weeks in Seoul, she tries to contact her birth mother, who does not respond to Hammond’s telegrams. Freddie, filled with contradictions, wants to be acknowledged by her mother, but loathes the attention she is receiving from her father. On what is to be her last night in Seoul, her father tracks her down outside a nightclub and berates her for hanging around useless men. Freddie tells Tena to communicate to her father that she wants to be left alone. Tena’s politeness is tested to the limit and ultimately, she leaves Freddie to her own destructive devices.
A jump in time finds Freddie back in Seoul, this time working for a French company. She’s engaging with hook ups with older men; in this specific case an arms dealer. From the casual sex, she goes home to her tattooist boyfriend, who has organised a birthday party for her. She is a seductive and destructive creature who still delights in creating a certain brand of chaos. Drugs and alcohol fuel her underground other life. A life that she soon leaves behind as a time jump places her working as a successful arms dealer, who is now back in Seoul to broker missiles to the Korean government.
Ji-Min PARK is an inscrutable presence as Freddie. What she wants is never really clear, and her dissatisfaction with what she has, is the character trait that defines her. Freddie leaves a trail of subtle destruction in her path but the person she’s destroying is a version of her past self. She meets her father and aunt again in Seoul for a dinner with her boyfriend. Her father seems more in control of his emotions and Freddie takes this as a subtle rejection. She craves attention as much as she despises it. When her boyfriend remarks that she resembles her father, Freddie leaves him in a taxi and goes on a bender.
Eventually, The Hammond Center make contact with Freddie’s birth mother. The meeting is as openly emotional as we will see Freddie onscreen. She just weeps as the woman enters the room. True vulnerability is something that Freddie skirts around up until this point. There is no distraction she can throw herself into, no avoidance – she must just exist with her grief.
Although Davy Chou’s film speaks to the complications involved with international adoptions and how that impacts upon the identity of the adoptee, Return to Seoul is a specific character study of one woman. Freddie’s propensity to blow up her life and rebuild it may come from her feeling of not belonging, but it may also be how she has chosen to shape herself. Ji-Min PARK, in her film debut, is mesmerising as a woman who breaks as much as she is broken. Freddie is not an easy character to like, and she openly defies the audience to identify with her; yet there is something real about a woman who changes skin because she cannot change her otherness, no matter where she is.
Return to Seoul is an intense drama that challenges the audience to empathise with a character who does not want sympathy. How do we support a character who chooses to be an arms dealer? It is Ji-Min PARK’s exceptional performance that makes the audience want to understand Freddie, and even if we can’t fully comprehend her there is no denying that she is fascinating.
