2023 Top Ten List #5 Return to Seoul (Retour à Séoul)

 

Writer/director Davy Chou

Davy Chou and Laure Badufle

Chou with some of his cast

Chou with Park Ji-min

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.

Davy Chou's Top 10 | Current - The Criterion Collection

Earth Mama

 

Olympian Savanah Leaf in 2012

Writer/director Savanah Leaf

Leaf with lead actress Tia Nomore

Tia Nomore

Leaf on the set with Tia Nomore

The director on the set

Leaf with cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes

EARTH MAMA         B+                                                                                                            USA  Great Britain  (97 mi)  2023  d: Savanah Leaf

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one’s feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever.  One is victimized, economically, in a thousand ways—rent, for example, or car insurance.  Go shopping one day in Harlem—for anything—and compare Harlem prices and quality with those downtown.                                                 ―James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 1961, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948–1985

Adapting her own short film into a feature-length film debut, this film has its roots in THE HEART STILL HUMS (2020), made with Waves actress Taylor Russell, a 30-minute short that documents the lives of five single women of color as they fight to be with their children in the foster care system, struggling through a cycle of poverty, drug addictions, and their own parental neglect in a system of structural inequality seemingly designed to keep people trapped in cycles of hopelessness, as it has a tendency of tearing families apart.  Told without an ounce of pretension, this quiet yet excruciatingly realistic, near documentary film showcases the life of a smart and resourceful single black mother who is pregnant, Gia (Oakland rapper Tia Nomore), whose two young children are already in foster care, where her life with them is reduced to a single hour once weekly, which is heavily supervised, subject to a stream of meetings and classes, along with constant drug tests.  Set in the Bay Area community of Oakland, it’s a wrenchingly emotional experience, which may mirror the experience of many impoverished black women who are subject to generational trauma from a child welfare system in place that takes away their children, exactly as they did with their mothers, and the mothers before that.  Continuing that inescapable cycle, Gia lives with her sister who deals drugs out of their home, leaving her subject to continual scrutiny, avoiding random home inspections at all costs, knowing the inevitable outcome.  What’s overwhelmingly effective is the eye-opening realization of just how routine this experience has become for poor black women, who don’t have the resources of other women, with no positive role models, where suspicion and distrust go hand in hand with the powers that be, where it feels all but impossible to effectively change this one-sided imbalance of power, where the state has all the rights, and the actual mothers have very few, where the consensus view is that mothers pose an inherent threat to their children because of their addiction problems.  For most viewers, this is unexplored territory, offering insight into a world that is completely off the radar, where you might think there may be little viewer connection, but the no-nonsense and completely authentic performance of Nomore is poignant and tenderly affecting, where this entry into her world is like entering foreign territory, resembling a war zone, where she is isolated and kept from her young daughter and son, who themselves grow distant and incommunicative, blaming their “captivity” on their mother, as they can’t return home, feeling hijacked by powerful forces they can’t understand.  The social realist style pulls no punches, demonstrating no showy techniques, simply allowing viewers to immerse themselves in Gia’s world, bringing empathy to every frame, where it’s hard not to be sympathetic, as the entrenched system provides her such a bleak existence, having a deadening effect on her soul.  Rarely has the mundane daily routine felt so brutal.  This film has a way of introducing us to someone we may never get to know in real life, and even if we did, we would not appreciate the unseen layers that provide the foundation of her existence, as her journey is an interior one, nearly invisible to the naked eye, historically ignored and completely invisible in the eyes of society, yet all she really wants is to protect her kids because no one was there to protect her.         

Leaf was born in London, coming to America at age 7, and was a 2012 Olympian at the age of 18 for Great Britain in the sport of volleyball, but also played AAU basketball until she suffered a career-ending injury, where her evolution into the world of cinema started by studying photography and making music videos, while in this film she mostly uses a non-professional cast.  Opening to the nearly forgotten music of Bettye Swann’s 1969 recording of Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye - YouTube (3:46), it offers a romantic portrait of love that seems just out of reach, but yearned for, becoming an essential component of the film.  What follows may be the most confrontational moment in the film, as a black woman (Tiffany Garner) takes the stage and offers her view in a therapeutic confessional sequence, “It’s my journey.  No one else’s journey.  Nobody can walk in my shoes.  You can hold my hand; you can look back from a distance.  You still won’t feel what I feel.  You still won’t look at that from my point of view.”  Without providing any back story, this is a film that never judges these women, or the caseworkers they’re forced to contend with, so viewers never realize what mistakes the women have made, only that the doors have been closed behind them.  A story of conflicted emotions, very observational, even meditative, where the day-to-day is searingly etched into our minds, Gia makes the rounds between classes, training sessions, and mandatory support groups that she is required to attend, growing frustrated at the lack of progress, while also working as a photographic assistant at the Photo Magic store in the mall, helping set up each of the family portrait shots of young couples and families with new children, telling them how to pose, arranging their clothes and their positioning for the camera, creating perfect moments that will help provide lasting memories, while also hanging out with a small circle of female friends afterwards, each commiserating with their struggles, where we get an idea what the women are going through.  Her best friends are Trina (Tampa rapper Doechii), who’s also pregnant, but worries about lapses in Gia’s judgment, though her domineering religious views eventually become alienating, citing Bible verses about God’s plan, while later in the film she feels more drawn towards Mel (Keta Price), a childhood friend who recently lost her own mother, casually yet affectionately calling Gia “Mama,” a term with incendiary implications, especially for black women, snapping back at her at one point, “I am not your mama,” as it implies a sympathetic role of providers and nurturers, with black women being mothers not just to their own children but other people’s children throughout history, becoming housekeepers or nannies, which harkens back to slavery days when black women mothered the slave-owner’s children.  She is also affectionately called this same term by the guys hanging out in front of her home, a reminder of how they see her, which is always in relationship to her children.  Perhaps the most surprising scene eloquently comes from two men, Earl (Bruhfromlastnight) and James (James Allen), recounting their experiences as children being ripped away from their mother’s arms and placed in group homes, sending them into emotional turmoil, eradicating their stability, all in the name of their “well-being,” but nothing was ever the same for them afterwards, as they were internally damaged, with something broken that could not be fixed.    

In 2018, it became more publicized that the federal government was officially separating undocumented immigrants from their children as a matter of Zero Tolerance American policy, not just temporarily, but permanently, with no tracking process or records that would allow them to be reunited, placing thousands of children up for international adoption (The Secret History of Family Separation).  The director reframes this tragedy through the prism of race and class, asking some of the most fundamental questions about motherhood, introducing the politics of race as it relates to the child-welfare laws in this country.  Leaf, who never knew her father, gleans some of this experience from her little sister, Corinna, who is 16-years younger, an adoptee from an open adoption who never saw her birth mom again, curiously making a brief appearance in the photo studio next to several guys.  Easily the biggest surprise is adding dreamlike sequences that are Gia’s avenue of escape, which only add depth and complexity, as we gain insight into her interior imagination and daydreams, capturing the shimmering beauty of the natural landscape surrounding the Bay area, where the forest actually meets the ocean (shot in nearby Vallejo), conjuring up primeval forces from deep within which mirror innate maternal feelings, where these deeply personalized moments may be the only aspect of her life that she has any control over, perhaps the only time she’s completely vulnerable and exposed.  In stark contrast, she finds herself continually at odds over the welfare system that has failed her, despite her best efforts, as they routinely fail to give her another chance.  Her impassive demeanor is largely a front hiding what she really feels, as the system is quick to condemn and blame her, unable to accumulate enough working hours to adequately support herself, always one step behind in her bills, as she’s continually had to alter her life to accommodate their structure, never really establishing any path for success.  Clearly she adores her children, patiently taking the time with each one of them during their visits, but even as she complies with all their rules and regulations, it doesn’t change anything, as her children are still stuck in a system that refuses to recognize her as a positive influence.  Making things more complicated is another baby is on the way, who she’s at risk of losing as well, where none of the fathers have any role to play, as they are simply absent.  Honestly, Gia has no use for any of them, believing she’s better off on her own.  As part of her support system, she has regular visits with a social worker named Carmen (Erika Alexander from The Cosby Show in the early 90’s), who attempts to guide her through her pregnancy, reminding her that they’re both part of a system that is designed “to work against women like us,” providing her with options that include adoption, something most white women are never encouraged to consider, as too often black women are encouraged to give up their children, where Gia has grown so untrustworthy that she thinks Carmen’s job is selling black babies to white families.  This should not come as a big surprise, as there’s no one that Gia has come to trust, literally no one, as people she thinks are her allies in the system quickly turn on her, so she suspects even those with the best of intentions.  The question in the back of her mind is always wondering if there are ulterior motives.  Trust is largely a forgotten commodity in her neighborhood, replaced by heavily guarded anxieties and fears, while also plagued by guilt, which seem to dominate her life, yet she tries to overlook all these factors, living her best life, fraught with tension, where the only thing for certain is the future is unknown.  Shot with a bracing directness on 16mm by Jody Lee Lipes, who also shot Kenneth Lonergan’s 2016 Top Ten List #5 Manchester by the Sea and Sean Durkin’s 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #5 Martha Marcy May Marlene, with new age music by singer, songwriter, and cellist Kelsey Lu that feels completely original, providing contemporary electronic ambience, accentuating the harp with lofty female voices during the finale that add an extra dimension to the film, taking us into unexplored regions.