Return to Seoul (2022)

User Review

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  Barneyonmovies

  8 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: Davy Chou's 'Return to Seoul,' is the character study of a restless woman called Freddie (Ji-Min Park) who was adopted to France from Korea as a baby. In her early twenties she travels to Seoul on a whim and decides to seek out her birth parents, then after a rocky first meeting with her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok), we meet her at various points over the subsequent years to see how she's coping.
  
  When we first meet her we don't know anything about her life in France, whether she knows any of the people she's interacting with in her travel hostel, or even why she ended up in Seoul at all. She's clearly a free spirit who doesn't care much for Korean customs, and she seems to seek out her biological parents on a complete whim, so it's not clear whether she feels any pull to her birthplace at all. When she does finally meet her father, she's extremely upset, angered and constricted by his attempts to act like family. But then when we pick up years later, she's still angry at her father, but has stayed in Seoul, suggesting she does feel a pull to the place she first came from after all no matter how chaotic her life is.
  
  The film keeps you longing to get under her skin, and that's partly because the script explains almost nothing away, but also because Freddie is working to understand herself throughout the film too as each scene and time reveals a new layer of feelings. In the end you see her as someone who has been masking her childhood uncertainty with confidence and hedonism, but, as she's slowly opened herself to that uncertainty, has ultimately become far more at peace.
  
  That's an engaging arc to uncover, but it only works because Chou's writing and the performances are so real. Characters all speak and act like people do in real life, and Freddie's multitudes are played very organically by Ji-Min Park. Couple all of that with the up-close camerawork which glues to characters' faces and the homes and streets they occupy and you've got yourself a thoroughly engaging character study.
  
  WHAT DIDN'T LIKE: At times Freddie is almost too aloof, and though the evolution of her arc is satisfying, the conclusion doesn't successfully build any metaphors for its slightly abstract ending.
  
  VERDICT: Davy Chou's 'Return to Seoul,' is a character study that makes you work to understand a fascinating woman as she works to understand herself.

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