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Freddie Benoît, the 25-year-old protagonist of Return to Seoul, presents herself as a nomad who’s wandered right into a overseas nation on a whim. The viewer meets her mid-drink at a bar in Seoul and shortly figures out that the buddies she’s sitting with are primarily strangers, a random assortment of latest friends she’s enticed whereas holding court docket and pouring soju. Freddie, brief for Frédérique, is a French girl who was adopted from South Korea at beginning. She’s come again to search out her organic dad and mom, a search that turns right into a jagged and irritating journey of self-discovery. She’s made the journey with out informing her adopted household and with little preparation—an strategy that fits the rebellious vibe she appears to be making an attempt out for the primary time in Seoul.
Performed by the actor Park Ji-min in her debut function, Freddie is a whirlwind of allure and chaos, someway coasting by though she doesn’t communicate Korean and is a novice to all the customs. As she’s repeatedly reminded, politeness dictates that you simply pour drinks just for others, not for your self, in Korean social conditions; to maintain her personal cup full, she retains inviting strangers to her desk. However she’s additionally motivated to make buddies as a result of she’s looking for new solutions to questions she usually can’t articulate—about her identification, her place on this planet, and her path ahead. The author-director Davy Chou’s movie, which had a short Oscar-qualifying run in theaters final fall however is lastly being correctly launched this weekend, is likely one of the most shocking dramas of the yr to this point.
Chou was impressed by a real-life buddy who, in her 20s, equally returned to Korea to reconnect together with her beginning father; Chou witnessed the reunion. However the filmmaker has one other, much more private hyperlink to the story: He was born in France to folks who had left Cambodia earlier than the Khmer Rouge took over, and he first visited their homeland on the age of 25, connecting with a tradition that was each far-off and acquainted. Chou’s first two options, the 2011 documentary Golden Slumbers and the 2016 drama Diamond Island, have been made in Cambodia. He didn’t know very a lot in regards to the Korean setting he selected for Return to Seoul. However that distanced perspective solely bolsters the movie’s underlying sense of curiosity and thriller.
Freddie, by and huge, is oblivious in Seoul: She asks her bar mates inappropriate questions, flirts up a storm, and ultimately blusters her method into the adoption company that despatched her to France when she was a child. She strikes recklessly but successfully, because of the sheer pressure of her character. Freddie is tough to pin down; she usually actually flees from the body. In a number of sequences, she dances with abandon, the digital camera working frantically to maintain her in its sight.
Park’s efficiency is extraordinary, shifting from coquettish to threatening to needy with out ever shedding grasp of the character’s core anxieties about lineage and belonging. The movie resists simple sentimentality when introducing Freddie’s beginning household, who greet her with a mixture of curiosity and disgrace. They aren’t the ultimate piece of the puzzle; they don’t have easy solutions for Freddie as to why she was given up for adoption or, extra vital, why she feels such deep existential listlessness. All through the film, Freddie appears determined to grasp the contradictions of her identification—she’s not fairly glad together with her life in France or her relationship together with her adoptive dad and mom (whom we briefly glimpse in a candy but melancholy telephone name), however she feels equally uncomfortable and misplaced in Korea. The impulsiveness she displays there’s seen with trepidation by her new buddies and her beginning household alike.
Because the movie goes on, it jumps by time and portrays a number of radical transformations of Freddie’s character. With its ever-evolving protagonist, Return to Seoul defies neat categorization. It’s a low-budget character drama with the twists and turns of a high-octane thriller. It’s additionally a constantly satisfying watch that honors the issue of eager to be understood—and the aid of lastly releasing that want.
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