‘Return to Seoul’ Is Scored by Diasporic Anguish

Return to Seoul begins with a close-up. Tena played by Guka Han, is listening intently to Lee Jung Hwa’s ‘Flower Petal’ (1967), her face framed with a set of headphones. Lee’s vocalization is typical of popular Korean female singers of the late 1960s, a tangy but clear pitch that seems to pierce and weave through the guitar and synthesizer, at odds with the psychedelic tune. The first verse is short, and quickly slides into something of a cross between a chorus and a bridge, drifting between minor and major keys. With its many instrumental interludes, the song continues to modulate, never landing anywhere.

‘Flower Petal’ mirrors the journey of Freddie (Park Ji-min), the film’s Korean-born protagonist, an adoptee raised in Paris who books a flight to Seoul on a whim. The meandering song is divided into multiple passages, like the four-part film.  The lyrics, too, allude to lovers who no longer speak: one leaves, feeling rejected, wondering why their partner did not stop them. This sensibility – of feelings left unspoken, and our helplessness in the face of the past – is a familiarly Korean one. It occupies much of the film: Freddie struggles to recognize reciprocation for her need for love and belonging. For director Davy Chou, music threads together a film in three languages (French, Korean and English), in which mismatches between language and culture are cause for constant anguish for both the characters and the audience.

Chou has been known to cast debuting actors, as he did for Diamond Island (2016). Indeed, the film depends on the emotional range and fine performance of first-time actor Park Ji Min. Her charisma and embodied sense of anger match Freddie perfectly. Portrayed with voluminous curly hair, unmade-up face and casual clothes, she is unyielding in every way, cutting through the polished pop of Korean femininity with her dress, bearing, sexual fluidity and experimentation. 

When Freddie reunites with her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok), he reveals that it was his poverty, coupled with the departure of her mother Mija (Choi cho-woo) – sick of the countryside and longing for life in a city – that led him to put her up for adoption. But Chou does not delve deeply into Freddie or her family’s pain; moments of tenderness are quickly shattered. Freddie’s father asks Tena, the Seoul hostel worker who befriends Freddie and accompanies her as a translator, to ask Freddie if she ‘ever lacked anything’ while growing up. Freddie responds that her French family provided her a good life. In the next scene, he speaks performatively about his own childhood in a self-involved attempt to connect. It falls flat. Similarly, when Freddie’s adoring and welcoming grandmother (Hur our-wook), delivers a passionate mealtime prayer, her swollen emotion is met with a look of disgust.

The spectacle here is not so much Freddie’s disappointment at her strange and disconnected reunion with her family, but about the failure of all the characters to fully inhabit the tragedy that has befallen them. Set against the devastating history of postwar Korea and the rampant adoption of orphaned and abandoned children, Chou suggests that the core of the tragedy may ultimately be located in our inability to engage with ourselves and others; sincerity is undercut by psychological, familial and cultural complexes, awkwardness and vanity. Freddie, for instance, eventually succeeds in her search for her mother: the two meet in person. But Chou offers no cathartic resolution. Freddie’s email to her mother bounces back with an auto-response: the email address does not exist.

In one moment in the first half of the film, we see Freddie preparing to leave Korea for Paris; she has her final drinks with Tena, and Jiwan, a boy she met on her first day (Dong Seok Kim). In a bar where no one is dancing, she asks the DJ to play a song. A long shot tracks her dancing. She moves on tempo, but jaggedly – her waist and hips remain static. She moves forcefully, her arms waving almost as if she is throwing punches. Lost in the music, Freddie looks the freest she ever does. This is how I will remember Freddie.

^{Main image: Davy Chou, ‘Return to Seoul’, film still. Courtesy: Thomas Favel/Aurora Films/Sony Pictures Classics}