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| Writer/director Davy Chou |
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| Davy Chou and Laure Badufle |
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| Chou with some of his cast |
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| Chou with Park Ji-min |
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| Park Ji-min artworks |
RETURN TO SEOUL (Retour à Séoul) A- aka: All the People I’ll Never Be (title for Cannes premiere) France Germany Belgium South Korea Romania Cambodia Qatar (119 mi) 2022 d: Davy Chou
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be. Joan Dideon essay, On Keeping a Notebook, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968
A study of cultural displacement, where the consequences of war often leaves a stream of adoptees who must construct a new life in unknown territory, often assuming the identity of the newly inhabited land, while losing connections with the homeland of their parents and ancestors, which may as well be a strange and foreign place. This subject was explored in Gail Golgin’s DAUGHTER FROM DANANG (2002), a moving documentary portrait of a displaced Vietnamese girl airlifted out of Vietnam at the end of the war and raised in America, a mixed-race daughter of an American serviceman who becomes completely Americanized by her adoptive family, so when she’s reunited with her Vietnamese mother after the passage of 22-years, it does not go as expected, as she’s utterly horrified by the culture shock. The director has a similar experience, having grown up in France, the grandson of Norodom Sihanouk, a staple of Cambodian filmmaking during the 1960’s and the son of Cambodian parents who escaped the Khmer Rouge regime, he only returned to Cambodia at the age of 25, basing the story, however, on the experiences of a friend, Laure Badufle, who was born in South Korea, but was adopted in France after one year, returning to Korea at the age of 23 with a profound curiosity, yet also a strange build-up of inexplicable anger and resentments that do not easily translate into a polite Korean society. Chou actually accompanied her on a visit to South Korea to meet her biological father and grandmother, observing the multiple level of difficulties involved, not the least of which is bad communication and poor translations, presenting two different sides of a broken family history, inevitably feeling incomplete, where there’s a huge vacuum left to fill. In an interview with The New York Times (For a Film About Korean Adoptees, a Group Effort - The New York Times), Badufle offers her own personal assessment of the film, “I live with a sense of shame. For me, being adopted was a disability. I think adoptees feel proud of this movie — that it exists, that they can talk about and that they can explain to others how it is to be an adoptee.” Premiering at the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in 2022, the film recalls Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996) and Brooke Pepion Swaney’s 2022 Top Ten List #9 Daughter of the Lost Bird, but the film’s biggest revelation is the choice of lead actress, Park Ji-min, a visual artist who does sculptures, installations, and paintings, having no prior acting experience, yet she conveys a remarkable range of emotions that personifies what this film is about, literally embodying the tenacious, unpredictable character of this young woman, where her ability to convey emotions without the use of words is a masterful demonstration of restraint, as she hides her vulnerability behind a defiant veneer, beautifully captured by the verité camera of Thomas Favel. Park isn’t adopted herself, but her family moved to Paris from Korea when she was 9, allowing her to interject some of her own perspective and personal experiences into the role. Taking place over 8 years, set successively in 2014, 2016, 2021, and 2022, this is something of a rollercoaster ride of shifting sentiments, providing perspective on an experience that most are unfamiliar with, where the ultimate failure of the broken family is to fully grasp the depths of the tragedy, yet it’s a universal story with profound implications.
25-year-old Frédérique Benoît (Park Ji-Min), otherwise known as Freddie, was born in Seoul, but was abandoned by her Korean parents, arriving in Paris at the age of 8 where she was adopted by a white French couple and grew up in the French countryside, but now lives in Paris. However, the film opens in South Korea, where she’s there on a two-week holiday, having intended to go to Japan, but flights were cancelled following a typhoon, so on a whim she accepts the airline offer to Seoul, wanting to enjoy her time there, a country she knows nothing about, immediately befriending a hostel receptionist Tena (Guka Han, a writer based in Paris and Berlin) who is listening intently to music through headphones. Asking for a listen, Petal - YouTube Lee Jung Hwa (7:45), we hear a female pop vocalization typical of popular Korean singers of the late 1960’s, with the song alluding to lovers who no longer speak, where there are lingering feelings left unspoken, revealing our helplessness in the face of the past, a familiar Korean theme that resonates throughout the film, with the refrain repeating later with a poetic resurgence. With a mix of French, Korean, and English, the translations rarely match the emotional intent, evoking Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2002), so music offers a connection throughout the film that is more closely associated with the actual experiences, often accentuating a cultural disconnect, as Freddie is French, but a part of her is missing, also Korean, but alienated from that culture, feeling more like a perennial outsider, never really comfortable with herself. Right from the outset, however, her fearless charisma and embodied sense of anger are on full display, matching her fluidly evolving personality perfectly, with her billowing hair, lack of make-up, while dressed in casual attire, she is unyielding in every way, cutting through conservative Korean conventions by the sheer audacity of her fiercely independent attitudes. If Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo is any indication, Koreans spend a lot of time in bars and restaurants, where drinking soju traditionally loosens the inhibitions and helps create a closer bond in social situations with family and friends, with strict rules of etiquette that Freddie instinctively ignores. A quiet conversation with Tena and her friend Dongwan (Son Seung-Beom), RETURN TO SEOUL | "Land of My Birth" Official Clip YouTube (1:39), quickly escalates with Freddie brashly bringing various tables together purely for the shock value, where the drinking immediately gets out of hand, Return to Seoul / Retour à Séoul (2022) - Clip 1 (English subs) YouTube (50 seconds). In your 20’s you still feel invincible, with amazing recuperative powers, where even after a night of heavy drinking you can wake up the next morning and not feel the adverse effects. It’s one of the wonderful aspects of being young. While she has no thought of digging into her roots, or trying to find her biological parents, the power of suggestion leads her to the Hammond adoption agency, the most prominent in South Korea, which helps her connect with her Korean father (Oh Kwang-rok, from Park Chan-wook’s OLDBOY, 2003) and grandmother (Hur Ouk-Sook) in a disappointing family reunion that borders on the absurd. Unable to speak the language, she enlists the aid of Tena, whose mother was a French teacher, allowing her to converse in a discomforting and weirdly off-putting manner, as she’s immediately turned off by her father’s excessive drinking and sobbing remorse, bombarded by feelings of guilt, pleading for her to stay, ultimately becoming a tragic figure, where his well intended gestures are met with hostility, not really wanting to have anything more to do with the man, yet Tena discreetly turns her acrid comments into polite social refinement. Missing from this reunion is Freddie’s biological mother who divorced her father years ago and failed to respond to repeated requests from the agency.
By any stretch of the imagination, Freddie is a handful, which she proves over and over again, breaking the mold when it comes to social conventions, defying all expectations, yet it’s her self-destructive cruelty that is especially convincing, something missing from other adoption stories, becoming the living personification of the familiar adage, “hurt people hurt people.” In an attempt to express herself, she has bulldozed her Korean heritage, which does not go unnoticed, as she literally rubs distinctly Western attitudes in the face of Korean tradition, where one of the glorious moments comes in an electrifying dance sequence at a bar in her last night in Korea that can only be described as liberating, RETURN TO SEOUL | "Dancing" Official Clip YouTube (2:00). In something of a twist, Park actually danced during the shooting to the music of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle (Official Music Video) [HD Upgrade] (3:51), where her movements were remixed into the song “Anybody” composed by Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset, Retour à Séoul (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), reflecting a mix of a wounded heart and how she presents herself. The key to the film, however, is the tremendous character transformation she goes through, which is seamlessly and seemingly effortlessly presented by the first-time actress, initially appearing distant and aloof, yet sexually promiscuous, running through a series of boyfriends as she rages against her sense of abandonment before struggling to recognize reciprocation for her need for love and belonging. She later spends several years in South Korea under seemingly unimaginable circumstances that tiptoe into a minefield of dark humor, where her inclination is to gain control of her environment and make sense of it, yet she continually makes missteps, finding herself living in a subterranean world in Seoul, living with all kinds of subversive figures that she eventually discards. In the later parts of the film, she seems much more subdued, once again meeting her biological father, who is drinking considerably less, yet when they meet in a celebratory meal, he orders rounds of alcohol only to discover Freddie has given up both meat and alcohol, and instead consumes large quantities himself. Freddie’s birth name is Yeon-Hee, meaning “docile and joyful,” which comes into play when her father plays her a composition he has written for her, Yeon-Hee YouTube (54 seconds), which has a surprising emotional effect on her. Set against the devastating history of postwar Korea and the rampant adoption of orphaned and abandoned children that began in the 1950’s, where over 200,000 Korean children have been adopted since then into families in more than 15 countries, with nearly two-thirds sent to mostly white, Christian, American families. Studies show that 90 percent of those who place their children for adoption are unmarried mothers who felt pressure to give away their children, as single mothers are often ostracized in Korean culture, where employers typically ask women about their marital status in job interviews, while parents sometimes reject daughters who raise their children alone, as children of single mothers are often bullied in school. Korean adoptees may look Asian, but they’re brought up thinking, acting, and seeing themselves as white Americans, where the real problem is not being accepted in either culture (Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea). Chou suggests that the core of the tragedy may ultimately be located in our inability to recognize ourselves in others, which is undercut by psychological, family, and cultural differences that become exceedingly complex, creating awkward situations. Freddie’s mother, Mija (Choi cho-woo), refused to recognize her in the early years, avoiding all contact, yet finally agrees to meet her at a safe location at Hammond, becoming an extremely emotional moment that may take viewers by surprise, arguably the most poignant scene of the film, emphasizing the core of what’s been missing all her life, all the unanswered questions, and while it’s brief, it’s also packed with dramatic complexity, yet offers no cathartic resolution. In a heartbreaking moment just before they meet, Freddie asks one of the counselors why efforts to make contact continued years after receiving no response, when they were under a legal obligation to stop, and she’s informed, “Maybe we have employees who understand the feeling of being an adoptee.” In a remarkable transformation, Freddie breaks away from everyone around her in the end and is seen backpacking through one of the most desolate regions on earth (actually shot in Romania), discovering a remote inn which strangely enough has a piano, slowly retracing the song that was written for her while finding herself alone in the vast emptiness of the world. This is a film that resists easy sentimentality, as the sublimity of a Bach piano composition, considered the pinnacle of Western music, leads into the ambiguity of the finale.
