Return to Seoul review – Park Ji-min lights up mesmerising tale of identity and alienation – The Guardian
The Cambodian-French film-maker Davy Chou, a longtime champion of “misplaced” Cambodian cinema, made a splash in Cannes in 2016 together with his dramatic characteristic debut, Diamond Island, a prize winner within the worldwide critics’ week strand. For the lead function in his follow-up characteristic, Return to Seoul, about an adoptee who travels from France to Korea in the hunt for her roots, he turned to Korean-born visible artist Park Ji-min, who had moved to France as a baby however had no appearing expertise. An intense interval of collaboration adopted, and the result’s this remarkably intimate and really affecting drama – an episodic odyssey (impressed by script advisor Laure Badufle) spanning one of the best a part of a decade. It grew to become Cambodia’s entry for this yr’s ninety fifth Academy Awards, and confirms each Chou and Park as main skills to look at, in no matter discipline.
We first meet Freddie (Park) when she ships up in Seoul as if by chance; we later be taught that she was sure for Tokyo, however all of the flights had been grounded. Lodge clerk Tena (Guka Han) appears to spy a misplaced soul and takes Freddie underneath her wing, though it quickly turns into clear that this new arrival can be an agent of chaos, overturning well mannered social mores with an exuberance that implies deep well-springs of buried anger and confusion.
An unannounced journey to an adoption centre reveals Freddie’s delivery identify, Yeon-hee (“it means docile and joyous”), and places her in contact along with her organic father (Oh Kwang-rok), a moderately hapless household man whose response to his daughter’s reappearance is to drunkenly beg her to stay in Korea. As for her delivery mom, she refuses to reply the telegrams despatched by the company, leaving a gaping gap in Freddie’s quest.
Regardless of being instructed that she has a “pure” or “old-time” Korean face, it’s clear that Freddie (who has but to be taught the language and customs of her mom nation) continues to be a fish out of water, somebody who defiantly declares themselves to be French, however whose fragmentary relationships – social, sexual, familial – are haunted by an ever-elusive sense of id.
Cinematographer Thomas Favel’s prolonged closeups invite us to look at Park’s minutest facial expressions as Freddie finds herself within the firm of people that look like her however from whom she feels distant. There’s one thing mesmerising in regards to the silent cacophony of conflicting feelings that Park conveys, with recognition and alienation locked in speechless battle. Certainly, over the course of the movie’s chaptered episodes, that are separated by intervals of years, we see Freddie reinvent herself a number of occasions, reworking with every new section, making an attempt on completely different identities, solely to shed them and begin once more.
“I by no means wanted anyone, I by no means wanted anyone,” runs the pumping refrain of the techno tune by soundtrackers Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset, to which Freddie dances frenetically in a key scene, the digital camera’s swirling POV cleverly inflicting these round her to all however disappear. Such a wild show is Freddie’s most well-liked tactic at any time when anybody will get too shut, protecting all the pieces at arm’s size, as if the potential for real intimacy prompts a state of panic. Whether or not she’s being a backpacker or an arms supplier (the pinballing private narrative is convincingly unpredictable), Park’s portrayal of Freddie by no means misses a beat – an astonishing transformative feat for a first-time actor who appears to reach on display screen as a completely shaped, multifaceted performer, inhabiting the movie’s kaleidoscopic central character.
Political historical past performs a private function, as Freddie reads in regards to the fallout from the Korean warfare, and is later reimagined as “that James Bond lady”, fulfilling her future in a career that may supposedly assist to guard South Korea from the aggressions of the North. But maybe the movie’s most poignant second comes when Freddie’s father performs her a brief recording of a track he has written – a easy, descending keyboard melody that feels like a nursery rhyme performed on a music field. “Not dangerous for somebody self-taught,” remarks Freddie’s present companion, a tin-eared sort whom she later tells: “I may wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers.” As for that track, it can’t be so simply erased, suggesting that behind all of the noise and all of the language (conversations play out in a Babel-like hotch-potch of tongues) there stays a nonetheless small voice of calm, ready to be heard.
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