“Return to Seoul” by French-Cambodian director Davy Chou will be screened at the Meta House tomorrow at 7.30pm. An opportunity to look back at this bold, delicate and powerful film about the quest for identity. A two-hour work that also shines for the subtlety of its script, its patient pace and the exceptional performance of its protagonist.
Journey
Freddie Benoit (Ji-Min Park) was born in Seoul and adopted by a French couple. Now aged 25, an airplane complication (?) brings her back to her hometown, where she sets off, with much doubt and hesitation, in search of her biological parents.
Through this search for her parents and for Korean culture, the story of the young Frenchwoman's journey ultimately becomes a beautiful and sometimes painful portrait of the inner journey of a woman who is a little lost on her way through life.
Using a visual style already evident in Diamond Island - high contrasts, fairly long close-ups, intense captures of expressions to the detriment of dialogue - Davy Chou builds Freddie's quest with a measured slowness, fragmented into several long stages, inviting the viewer to reflect and even to offer his own conclusions and thoughts on the young woman's actions.
Chou doesn't judge, he doesn't pull (too) many strings, he throws the heroine's raw emotions, reactions and sometimes unpredictable actions right in her face.
Then it's up to you to decide whether this ‘French-Korean’, who undoubtedly suffers the pain of abandonment and seems to care little for those around her, deserves to find inner peace.
Indeed, while the screenplay revolves around an adoption, the director goes further by highlighting the contradictions that can affect the minds of adopted, abandoned or orphaned children, but also those with a dual culture or even those of mixed race. And somewhere along the line, its subject matter could also lean towards the political. By brutally exposing the malaise of this Eurasian woman and the damage that adoption or dual culture can create, he reminds us, whether unwittingly or not, that it is indeed the West that has, more or less through proxy wars and colonisation, provoked this phenomenon of adoptions, refugees and exodus... and the malaise of these Eurasians and Amerasians.
On this point, the question remains. Whether Freddie had a happy childhood. With the exception of a brief video interview with his adoptive mother, we see and know absolutely nothing about his life in France.
However, through the heroine's visit to the adoption centre, Davy Chou provides a brief explanation of the phenomenon of record numbers of adoptions in Korea between the end of the fratricidal conflict and the mid-1980s.
Milestones
From the very first shots, Freddie's arrival at a guest house in Seoul, the director sets the scene: the journey will be long, unpredictable and chaotic. Freddie is a wild, selfish young woman who skilfully seduces those around her in order to use them, only to abandon them when it suits her or when she simply feels like it.
In this respect, his rapprochement with Tena (Guka Han), the mild-mannered and polite employee of the inn where she is staying, is highly significant. Freddie seduces Tena, using her as a guide, translator and ‘friend’, and it seems certain from the outset that this relationship, and those that follow, are doomed to disaster given Freddie's propensity for ‘social’ destruction without regard for collateral damage.
In this first part, which is rather cold and depicts (so far) an unattractive Seoul, Freddie goes to the centre where she was adopted to investigate her biological parents. Discovering that they are now separated and that only her father (Oh Kwang-rok) will meet her, she travels to the provinces where he lives with his second wife and new family.
It's a visit full of unease, incomprehension and guilt, poorly expressed because of the language barrier and Freddie's resentment of his alcohol-addled father.
This is perhaps the least exciting part of the film, and if we finally say to ourselves that Freddie probably wants to give up, we wonder whether the risk of witnessing a long sadness painted on film isn't real. But that's to misunderstand the director, who in one second sweeps away this sad Korea, with its bars for teenagers blasting pseudo-techno music and this family that's impossible to put back together, to switch to a second part that's much more exciting, more violent and, in a certain sense, more moving.
Evolution
This second part of the film takes place after Freddie has (guess what) moved to Seoul two years after her first trip. The young woman has abandoned her jeans, backpaker style and almost-battled hair to sport a very ‘Replicant - Matrix’ look: slicked-back hair, overly mauve lipstick and a high-collared coat. Without giving away too many details about her professional activity - apparently she's in bed with an arms dealer, both literally and figuratively - the director shows Freddie evolving in a rather underground milieu where we meet tattoo artists, clubbers and other night owls in a dark and rainy, but oh-so-photogenic Seoul.
As a bonus, the soundtrack is perfectly timed, this time at 140 BPM, like a super video clip, especially for the birthday scene. It's an absolutely magnificent scene in which Freddie plays off another French girl of Korean origin who has also come to find her biological parents. It's an intense scene where, for a few dozen seconds, Freddie stares inquisitively into the soft eyes of his ‘friend’ without saying a word, but during which the beautiful face of this slightly naive French-Korean woman unravels, for a few dozen seconds during which those pretty, imperfect eyes, which look as if they've been drawn with charcoal, decompose and become clouded with sadness.
20 seconds for an eternity of emotion, Davy Chou is not only an artist, but also an immense poet of images
In the third part, Freddie, who has now (we guess) become a businesswoman and is still selling arms, travels to Seoul with her French boyfriend to meet her father again. A more relaxed encounter, the two protagonists have not forgotten their nightmares, regrets and resentments; they seem to have made friends with each other.
And, once again, the director points to politics, even if the discussion between Freddie and her father about selling arms verges on the comical, the dilemma is underlined: why is Freddie selling missiles to a country that has suffered war and of which she is an indirect victim?
Indispensable
The director has achieved a tour de force: making the pain of these lost children understandable to those who are not. In fact, the pain of living through adoption can only really be felt by those who are the victims. In fact, a few exchanges after the first screening in April 2023 between relatives of adopted children left no doubt that the film's message is accurate.
‘I know people who have tried to find their parents, others who have never had the strength, and still others who have come close to Asia, but without going all the way...’ they said.
And, in the shape of his argument, Davy benefited not only from a remarkable technical team, but also, and above all, from an absolutely exceptional lead performer. With a minimum of dialogue, Ji-Min Park, in her first role, delivers an impressive range of emotions, which the director was able to use for the force of his message, but also to give his film a stamp, a style, a continuous emotion.
In fact, Ji-Min Park delivers a performance full of depth and unexpectedness that Davy Chou constantly enriches with an eminently subtle construction, a sense of image and a splendid soundtrack alternating captivating Korean melodies and minimal rhythms.
A film to see, listen to and feel...
Comments