Review: Return To Seoul

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The young woman's name is Freddie (Park Ji-min) and she gives off the impression of confidence during her travels in South Korea, the place where she was born but then given away to adoptive parents in France. 

During an opening scene at a restaurant, she surprises newly-made friends Tena (Guka Han) and Dongwon (Son Seung-Beom) during a discussion about line reading music when she grabs various other people in the restaurant and gets them - all strangers - to congregate at one table. Similar to line reading, she is engaging all of these people in conversation without prior practice.

During that same scene, Dongwon explains to her that it's considered insulting in South Korea if you do not allow a friend to pour a drink for you as it's a means of showing that they're willing to take care of you. But Freddie, who is on her own in a country that is foreign to her despite her origins and whose plan - whether she'll actually admit it - is to seek out the parents who gave her up for adoption, has long been able to take care of herself and pours the drink herself. 

During a later scene, she again displays what appears to be confidence by dancing in a bar in front of everyone else, while during another sequence she makes a pass at a French arms dealer visiting Seoul by whom she'll later be employed.

But this confidence is seemingly a form of overcompensating for her discomfort with the real purpose of her trip. When finally meeting up with the father (Oh Kwang-Rok) who gave her up for adoption, she comes off as withdrawn and quiet. She becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the sorrowful messages he texts to her after he's been drinking. During a later scene in which she finally tracks down her long-lost mother - who is divorced from her father - she appears even less confident.

"Return to Seoul" is a beguiling movie and one of its best qualities - aside from Park's stellar performance - is that you never quite know which direction it will go next, and the direction it chooses is always  captivating. The film jumps around in time - the first scenes are Freddie's original visit, and skips in time detail either other periods later in the future when she visits Seoul or others possibly suggesting that she's living there. It's never quite clear.

The film veers back and forth through various moods - somber during Freddie's meetings with her father and his overly eager extended family, dreamy during scenes in which she wanders through neon-lit Seoul, and stylish during nightclub and bar scenes that are punctuated with some great needle drops that I'd never heard before.

But what makes the movie so compelling is the character of Freddie, who is lonely, moody, compulsive, occasionally petty, distant, vivacious, vulnerable and, as one character tells her, "a very sad person." Her attempts to distance herself from emotion - the pleas of her birth father and dismissive comments made to boyfriends who she treats as expendable - show that she is a person who has never fully healed from a long-ago wound.

This is the first film I've seen from director Davy Chou, who has made at least one other feature, a documentary and some short films - but what I've seen so far is impressive. "Return to Seoul" creates a complex and interesting character and throws her into a story about the complexities of human relations and juggles multiple timelines (although the film is told in a linear fashion). I hadn't heard much about the picture until it popped up on a number of best-of-the-year lists in December, but I can now see why it received so much love. This is a very good movie from a director whose next project I anxiously anticipate.