Sometimes it’s impossible to know anyone’s real motivations. No matter how well we think we know someone, people can and will always surprise us with the multitudes they contain. A single human being is capable of astonishing acts of cruelty or kindness, sometimes within the same moment. Cynics say that no one ever really changes, but I think we’re always changing, experience to experience. Every person we meet, every encounter we have, every new song we hear or movie we see: all of it changes us in ways we hardly perceive until the person we were has already begun to recede.
“Return to Seoul” follows the character of Freddie (the absolutely incendiary Ji-Min Park), a woman in her mid-20s who was born in South Korea before being adopted and then raised in France. When her flight to Japan is canceled for a two-week planned vacation, Freddie decides to go to South Korea instead — a country she hasn’t set foot in since her adoption.
Once Freddie arrives and is unwillingly pulled into a culture she knows nothing about (she doesn’t speak Korean and very much considers herself to be French), we watch as she not only searches for the birth parents she doesn’t remember, but also tries to discover the person she might have been. Over the next two hours, we follow eight years of Freddie’s life and by the film’s close, I’m not sure we know her any better than we did at the beginning. And maybe that’s OK.
“Return to Seoul” is one of the first movies I’ve ever seen that’s a deeply granular character study of one woman’s melancholy and search for identity where the central character remains so enigmatic. Freddie doesn’t go to Korea to find her birth parents. In fact, she’s barely interested in exploring her Korean origins. But the new friends she makes think she should be, so then she is. Most of the choices she makes aren’t in fact even her choices, but ways for her to either please the people around her or to quiet her own restless spirit enough to have a moment of peace.
Freddie seethes at being told what to do or who she must be. When her new friends stop her from pouring her own drink (it’s insulting to your companions to do so), she barely registers what they’re saying before pouring her own soju and downing it. Watching lots of movies usually informs us how a character is going to act before they do it, but the truly remarkable writer/director Davy Chou always keeps Freddie as a character feeling as unpredictable as she must feel in her own mind.
So back to motivations: the one real motivation we can ascribe to Freddie is that she’s searching for her identity, but we don’t really know what that means in the context of her life. It doesn’t appear racial or cultural, but instead something more ephemeral that it seems she only ever finds in the unseen margins of the film. We’re not invited to watch Freddie change, but instead given access to her after she’s already trying on a new persona to see if it fits.
There’s something frustrating about the distance we’re kept at, but as the film progressed I found it to be a brilliant choice. We end up knowing Freddie about as much as she knows herself. Davy Chou’s direction and Park’s performance are so subtle and lived in that “Return to Seoul” feels like snapshots of a life more than it does a scripted drama. That frustrating opacity is what keeps the film feeling more like an organic extension of reality than just another movie.
“Return to Seoul” isn’t necessarily satisfying in a typically cinematic way. Nothing is wrapped up in a bow and we’re left without knowing whether Freddie has finally leveled up to her best self. She’s not someone we know well enough to make that judgement. She’s not a friend, but an acquaintance. And, again, that’s OK. Some people are impossible to know.
This article appears in Source Weekly April 13, 2023.
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