Picky roots – Newspaper Kommersant No. 63 (7508) dated 04/12/2023

‘Return to Seoul’ by Daewi Shu, a participant in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ program at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, is in theaters. Nervous drama about a young woman in search of an identity impressed Julia Shagelman freshness of visual solutions and plot twists.

In order to return somewhere, this place must first be left. In the case of the film’s protagonist, Freddie (artist Park Chi Min in her debut film role), this happened against her will. In infancy, the girl, then named Yong Hee, was given up for adoption by her biological parents and raised by a couple from France, who gave her the completely French name of Frederic Benois and instilled the appropriate language and culture. Therefore, Freddie’s arrival in Seoul 25 years later can hardly be called a return in the full sense: she comes to her historical homeland for the first time and, in her own words, impromptu – just a flight to Tokyo, where she was going, was canceled due to a typhoon, but what to spend two weeks of vacation.

Everyone, starting with Tena (Guka Han), who works at the reception in a modest hotel, who becomes Freddie’s translator, guide and almost a friend, immediately assumes that she came to Korea to find her family and fall back on her roots. But Freddie herself, sharp, prickly, preferring to repel people rather than attract (and the more they seek to establish contact, the higher the wall she erects around herself), claims that this does not interest her. In the end, she goes to the adoption center as if at gunpoint and at first confuses the kind employee with her seeming indifference to the question of her origin. When it turns out that her Korean name means “meek and joyful”, Freddie manages not to burst into sarcastic laughter, but her face reflects a complex range of emotions: it’s really hard to find two words that would fit her less.

In fact, of course, this emphasized detachment and unfriendliness is a protective mask, almost adhered to her face, but what Freddie hides under it, she herself, it seems, cannot really understand. Calling herself French, she is stuck between two worlds: in Korea, everything is alien and incomprehensible (the words of new friends that she has a face “like from the ancient Korea of ​​our ancestors”, Freddie takes it not at all as a compliment), but also to France, if judging by a single tense conversation with her foster mother (Regine Vial), she doesn’t seem to have much to bind her to. Whether she wants to find herself in Korea or, on the contrary, run away from herself – Davy Shu and his co-author Laure Badufl leave the right to answer this question to the audience, offering one option, then the second, or even an unpredictable third.

The first cracks in the façade Freddie has built come when she learns at the adoption center that her birth mother has refused to contact her. She visits the family of her biological father (Oh Gwang Nok), a weak-willed man who drowns his guilt in alcohol and immediately wants to atone for this guilt by persuading his newly found daughter to stay in Korea. Grandmother (Ho Jin), aunt (Kim Sun Young), half-sisters and second wife of his father – Freddie does not find what he needs in any of them, the father himself irritates her with tearful sentimentality, and the more painful against this background the silence of that the woman who rejected her again.

At the moment when we seem to have settled in the film (despite the almost unbearable awkwardness of the scenes of Freddie’s communication with the family), got used to his rhythm and understood where he was going, the authors jump forward the action two years ahead. Freddie, who now lives in Seoul, is trying on a new mask: a new hairstyle, blood red lipstick, an armor-like leather jacket that makes her look like a Korean crime thriller heroine, a new boyfriend (Lim Chul-hyun), neon flashes of nightlife and risque internet dating. This is not the last change – the film will jump ahead again, now by five years (Freddie will put on a completely literal mask in connection with the pandemic, establish, if not warm, then polite relations with his father and aunt, and take on work that is both unexpected and very suitable to her character, which by that time we will have time, perhaps, to understand a little), and then show us another of her faces. One thing remains unchanged: her longing for her absent mother, that missing piece of the puzzle, without which the heroine cannot put herself together and find the place where she wants to return.