The Cambodian-French film-maker Davy Chou, a longtime champion of “lost” Cambodian cinema, made a splash in Cannes in 2016 with his dramatic feature debut, Diamond Island, a prize winner in the international critics’ week strand. For the lead role in his follow-up feature, Return to Seoul, about an adoptee who travels from France to Korea in search of her roots, he turned to Korean-born visual artist Park Ji-min, who had moved to France as a child but had no acting experience. An intense period of collaboration followed, and the result is this remarkably intimate and very affecting drama – an episodic odyssey (inspired by script consultant Laure Badufle) spanning the best part of a decade. It became Cambodia’s entry for this year’s 95th Academy Awards, and confirms both Chou and Park as major talents to watch, in whatever field.
We first meet Freddie (Park) when she ships up in Seoul as if by accident; we later learn that she was bound for Tokyo, but all the flights were grounded. Hotel clerk Tena (Guka Han) seems to spy a lost soul and takes Freddie under her wing, although it soon becomes clear that this new arrival is also an agent of chaos, overturning polite social mores with an exuberance that suggests deep well-springs of buried anger and confusion.
An unannounced trip to an adoption centre reveals Freddie’s birth name, Yeon-hee (“it means docile and joyous”), and puts her in touch with her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok), a rather hapless family man whose reaction to his daughter’s reappearance is to drunkenly beg her to remain in Korea. As for her birth mother, she refuses to answer the telegrams sent by the agency, leaving a gaping hole in Freddie’s quest.
Despite being told that she has a “pure” or “old-time” Korean face, it’s clear that Freddie (who has yet to learn the language and customs of her mother country) is still a fish out of water, someone who defiantly declares themselves to be French, but whose fragmentary relationships – social, sexual, familial – are haunted by an ever-elusive sense of identity.
Cinematographer Thomas Favel’s extended closeups invite us to examine Park’s minutest facial expressions as Freddie finds herself in the company of people who look like her but from whom she feels remote. There’s something mesmerising about the silent cacophony of conflicting emotions that Park conveys, with recognition and alienation locked in speechless battle. Indeed, over the course of the film’s chaptered episodes, which are separated by periods of years, we see Freddie reinvent herself several times, transforming with each new phase, trying on different identities, only to shed them and start again.
“I never needed anybody, I never needed anybody,” runs the pumping chorus of the techno tune by soundtrackers Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset, to which Freddie dances frenetically in a key scene, the camera’s swirling POV cleverly causing those around her to all but disappear. Such a wild display is Freddie’s preferred tactic whenever anyone gets too close, keeping everything at arm’s length, as if the possibility of genuine intimacy prompts a state of panic. Whether she’s being a backpacker or an arms dealer (the pinballing personal narrative is convincingly unpredictable), Park’s portrayal of Freddie never misses a beat – an astonishing transformative feat for a first-time actor who seems to arrive on screen as a fully formed, multifaceted performer, inhabiting the film’s kaleidoscopic central character.
Political history plays a personal role, as Freddie reads about the fallout from the Korean war, and is later reimagined as “that James Bond girl”, fulfilling her destiny in a profession that will supposedly help to protect South Korea from the aggressions of the North. Yet perhaps the film’s most poignant moment comes when Freddie’s father plays her a short recording of a song he has written – a simple, descending keyboard melody that sounds like a nursery rhyme played on a music box. “Not bad for someone self-taught,” remarks Freddie’s current partner, a tin-eared type whom she later tells: “I could wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers.” As for that song, it cannot be so easily erased, suggesting that behind all the noise and all the language (conversations play out in a Babel-like hotch-potch of tongues) there remains a still small voice of calm, waiting to be heard.
