Return to Seoul (2022 | France | 115 minutes | Davy Chou)
SIFF has a knack for discovering the gems amongst thousands of films released, re-released and yet-to-be nationally released every year. Return to Seoul is one of those gems and it’s playing this week at SIFF Cinema Uptown.
Native born South Korean, Freddie (Ji-Min Park) was adopted by a French family when she was only months old. As she attempts adulthood, Freddie is unexpectedly pulled toward her birthplace and without a ounce of Korean fluency she flies there on a whim. Despite saying otherwise to her new Korean friends, she desperately wants to connect with her birth parents. First finding her father, he unabashedly throws himself at her, full of regret and wants to make amends with suffocating placation. In contrast, her mother refuses her request to meet or even speak.
Jumping forward a couple years, we find her still in Seoul with a group of party-all-night friends, a boyfriend, and a frequent flyer card on hookup apps. She’d secretly been waiting for word from her mother, and when the final rejection came it opened a crack in the thick facade she’d been wearing most of her life. Jump ahead again and she attempts another reunion with her father, despite “growing up” since they last time they met, she still wasn’t satisfied… his love wasn’t what she wanted. A few more years go by and she hears from her mother, a last-ditch effort by Freddie to find her. Her mother does come, hugs her, asks to keep in touch… but it was only for show, with something as simple as a fake email address she breaks Freddie’s heart once again.
A brilliant, heart-wrenching journey into a world that most of us will never understand much less experience. Through the eyes of a young French woman as she discovers a culture she was born to, but never knew is a fascinating character study, but it’s more than that. The emotional complexity of loving the two people who brought you up, nurtured you and fed you, while at the same time feeling disconnected from them and everyone else around you; faces that don’t reflect your own. Appreciating the love of your parents, but wanting, needing the love of someone you’ve never known must be incredibly confusing. Park was impressive, using the slightest expression changes or even just a look to intimate the complex emotions internalized through every encounter. Unexpected, but well-executed the editorial decision to jump to each important moment between her and her birth parents shows how she changed in each iteration desperate to find the real version of herself. All she actually wanted was acceptance, still that rejected young woman that just wants to be loved.
Return to Seoul is showing now in Seattle at SIFF Cinema Uptown