Review: an underwhelming Return to Seoul
It’s several years ago. The setting is a late night bar in Seoul. Freddie (Ji-Min Park), a Frenchwoman who has “accidentally” traveled to her country of birth and reunited with her biological father, is stewing over drinks with two makeshift friends: Tena (Guka Han), a wallflower who’s been acting as Freddie’s translator, and Jiwan (Dong Seok Kim), a sentimental sweetheart with whom Freddie had sex on her first night in Korea.
As Freddie ruminates on her distressing filial visit, anticipating her imminent return to France, Jiwan offers helpessly romantic overtures, asking her to stay. “I’m in love with you,” he mutters.
Freddie scoffs at him. “Tell him I have a boyfriend back home,” she instructs Tena. Then she rises and scurries up the bar’s DJ, teasing his hair and asking him to play a song for dancing. She proceeds to bop up and down, gyrating with angular harshness to the beat, before returning to her seat.
Again, Jiwan tries to convince her of his feelings. “I have boyfriend in France,” she insists, in English, even though her companions know this is a lie. Humiliated, Jiwan gets up to leave. Tena rises to follow him, but Freddie holds her back. She nuzzles close to her quiet acquaintance and brings her lips towards the stern young woman’s face.
But Tena draws away. “You’re a very sad person,” she says, before leaving the bar. Freddie stares after her — alone again. Is she unaware of her cruelty, of the extent of the hurt she’s caused? Or is she aware, and, therefore, that much worse of a human being for it?
Indeed, Freddie is not the easiest person to root for — I’d much rather go off with Tena or Jiwan, and witness their respective reckonings with this fair-weather friend’s unkind behavior. Yet we stick with the jerk of these three, and while writer-director Davy Chou’s focus on Freddie invites the expectation that his movie might be distinctly edgy or frenetic, in fact, Return to Seoul is an underwhelming portrait of restless alienation, a study in one woman’s fitful struggle to place herself that somehow elides any true impression of angst, discomfort, or urgency.
Due to its focus, Chou’s film is reminiscent of last year’s The Worst Person in the World, the Norwegian comedy-drama directed by Joachim Trier about one young woman’s haphazard and occasionally hurtful life choices. Both films feature a woman protagonist who, at times, acts unsympathetically — a still-novel concept that deserves continued big screen treatment — yet Chou takes this concept further by having Freddie push at the boundaries of what’s considered moral at not only an interpersonal, but a geopolitical level: one of her dalliances is with an arms dealer (played by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and when the film cuts ahead a few years, we find that she’s become his business associate.
Her turns in character, or her turns against other characters, are equally unethical; she impulsively breaks up with one of her boyfriends by telling him: “I can have you wiped out of my life like it’s nothing.” She says this to him as an arms dealer, which makes her statement all the more terrifying and reckless. And granted, yes, she’s feeling harrowed by recent interactions with her biological family when she says these words, but one’s traumas cannot be used as an excuse for inflicting trauma on others.
Return to Seoul is most interesting in this capacity, where it draws a line that links one person’s sense of displacement with the unscrupulous decision-making of those who work in powerful, damaging industries. Yet Mr. Chou never really makes good on this premise; it’s merely a side note, a scribble in the margins of Freddie’s story. She’s allowed a lot more narrative latitude than this critic’s snowflake heart is easily prepared to accept, as, rather than pursue such a sinister and compelling glimpse into the hearts of corporate villains, Chou has Freddie scrap that lifestyle, as she has others, and instead backpack through Romania. (Or, at least, he gives the impression that she’s scrapped that lifestyle — a nice long hike may simply be how Freddie spends her ample vacation time.)
Because it settles for the human yet fairly banal motions of an adopted woman’s coming-to-terms with her family of origin, and, therefore, herself, Return to Seoul refuses a riskier or more challenging assessment of international identity. Freddie’s wanderings may be representative of how many diasporic people float through life, yet the film suffers for prioritizing one person’s private anguish at the expense of their public immorality: at what point does a character’s actions prove them unworthy of sympathy? And at what point does a movie fail because it remains determined to hold said character in a sympathetic light?
This being said, Mr. Chou does elicit a number of memorable performances from his cast. Park is fittingly enigmatic, and emotional when she needs to be, but she’s bolstered by richly compelling supporting work from, first, Han, who plays Tena with luminous humility; Lim Cheol-hyun as Freddie’s elegantly somber Korean boyfriend, Kay-Kay (think Gregory Peck, but with neck tattoos); and Yoann Zimmer as her subsequent, hauntingly sweet French boyfriend, Maxime (the one she could have “wiped out”). Furthermore, throughout the film, Park is pitted against Oh Kwang-rok’s exquisite, volatile despotism as Freddie’s self-loathing biological father, while Kim Sun-young is gloriously modest, funny and affecting as her biological aunt.
It says something about a movie that its side characters come across as worthier of study than its central one. Return to Seoul doesn’t ask enough of itself as a work of art — it should either put Freddie on the outside of others’ lives, or embrace her coiled, hardened soul with more bravery and daring. In cinema, we want to see ugliness, especially when it’s presented with Mr. Chou’s cool sense of glamour. Let Freddie be a monster; she already is one.
