6/23/2023 0 Comments 3rd person point of view![]() ![]() The specificity of their experiences, and their characters’ experiences, make them more powerful for the audience we understand their feeling of being between worlds, and can map it onto our own version of that feeling. It’s a resonant, existential question, and in a rapidly globalizing world, it’s particularly interesting to see that directors with roots in several distinct cultures - Chou in France and Cambodia, Past Lives’s director Celine Song in Canada and Korea - are best equipped to tackle an experience that resonates more broadly. In that film, the main character also must grapple with a life she left behind as a child in Korea, and the person she might have been. In this way, Return to Seoul shares a great deal of DNA with one of 2023’s best films, the recent Sundance debut Past Lives. We understand their feeling of being between worlds, and can map it onto our own version of that feeling Each time jump gives us a new version of Freddie, one that’s in dialogue with the past versions and also struggling to find a way forward into the future. But here, Chou extends Freddie’s questioning of the lives she could have led into the future. Freddie, we realize, has already spent her life thinking, even subliminally, about the selves she isn’t, the lives she didn’t lead. That’s what’s so good about Return to Seoul: it keeps shapeshifting. The results of this inner turmoil play out over years. Freddie insists she’s French, but once she connects with her family’s roots - which seem to fascinate and also repel her - she isn’t sure where she fits. It seems she’s buried her sense of being an outsider deeply, and the film subtly brings them to a simmer, then a hot boil. It’s an adoptee’s tale, one that delicately deals with Freddie’s deep-rooted feelings of abandonment by her birth parents. ![]() That choice puts her on a fateful path, and from there you sort of think you know where this story is going. And, seemingly against her own will, she goes to Hammond, the adoption agency that maintains her records, and those of hundreds of thousands of other children adopted from Korea in the 1980s and 1990s. She coaxes a bunch of strangers in a restaurant to form one big party, and they drink very late into the night. But she’s in Seoul when we meet her, and immediately registers as a bit of an agent of chaos. She grew up in the French countryside, and now she lives in Paris. Return to Seoul centers on Freddie (Park Ji-min, whose performance is so good you’ll be startled to know it’s her first), a 25-year-old French woman who was adopted from Korea as an infant. When we first meet her, Freddie is a chaos agent. I walked in with very little idea of what to expect, and left with a full heart. Now that it’s in proper release, I’ve been able to revisit the film, which I first saw at Cannes last May. But in the weird time-space warp that is the movie release calendar, what that means is it got a “qualifying run” in 2022: it played at least a week in New York and Los Angeles, thereby rendering it eligible for awards according to the rules of the Oscars and many other voting bodies.īut that was just a blip. Technically Return to Seoul - the second fiction feature from Cambodian-French director Davy Chou - is a 2022 release, and it was No. So I stand before you now, insisting you see Return to Seoul. Back away slowly if you need, but know that the praise comes from some deep-rooted place, a belief that if you see this movie you’ll love it, too. But if you talk to those who experienced its magic before the rush began, you’ll get an effusive collar grab, a gentle shake, and a declaration that you must see this movie, you simply must. Sometimes a great movie gets buried, for whatever reason, in the end-of-year awards rush. ![]()
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