“You are a sad person”: Return to Seoul, 2022 (Review)

Premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Canned Film Festival on May 22, 2022, Return to Seoul (Retour à Séoul) is a meditation that follows the journey of a Korean-French woman, Freddie, back to Seoul, literally and figuratively, to search for her biological parents.

“You are a sad person”

Diasporic cinema is varied and includes diverse migratory situations and patterns — language and translation, memory, loss, nostalgia, and transnationalism. It speaks in many tongues, sometimes translating, sometimes transcending, the boundaries of language and culture. It remembers, in the same way that it mourns. It celebrates but it also destroys. It is the idea of the pilgrimage to find yourself, but only to end up feeling more adrift and isolated. The paradox of self-discovery that often leads to disorientation and seclusion.

Return to Seoul is about finding the real meaning of “home.” It is enmeshed in the existential struggle that we all face, and the empathy owed to that struggle in all forms. It is our common ground, whether we realize it or not.

Return to Seoul tells the story of Frédérique “Freddie” Benoît (Park Ji-Min), a 25-year-old adoptee of French nationality and Korean origin, now returning to Seoul for the first time on impulse with half a mind to track down her biological parents. At the onset, we see Freddie holding a faded photograph of a woman who might be her mother. It is the only memento of a country with which she has no familiarity.

On a whim, and somewhat against her French parents’ wishes, she decides to visit Seoul for the first time, hoping to find some clues about her Korean origins. Upon arriving in Seoul, she befriends Tena, the friendly receptionist she met at her hotel. Tena introduces her to the vibrant Seoul nightlife. Keen on her purpose in the metro, Freddie learns from Tena and another friend that the only way to access her adoption records is through the Hammond Adoption Center, an organization that controls the fate of many adoptees. She then decides to confront them and demand the truth about her past, but she is not prepared for what she will discover.

At its sould, Chou’s Return to Seoul examines the diasporic barriers built by children rejected by their parents

Return to Seoul is a direct hit at what I love and want more of in cinema. It genuinely understands loneliness and confusion. It’s one of the many emotional contradictions at the heart of Return to Seoul . The impossibility of bridging the gap between her would-be family and estranged birthplace is shown with bittersweet insight

Return to Seoul is one of my top 2022 films. But it is a frustrating film. A frustrating film about frustrating people. A trauma porn film. But while Park Ji-min as Freddie is a mess of contradictions, it’s never not her mess. If anything, Return to Seoul is a much-needed antidote to this year’s Past Lives.

I have written a review on the cinematic intersections of identity and disconnection for those people in diaspora in Lingua Franca, although in the much heavier and different footing coming from a trans OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker) perspective. Like I, who have engaged with diasporic media just recently, many people will understand the struggle of seeking quality works that illuminate the cultural and psychological space that emerges when people exist between two cultures, but neither fully belonging to one nor the other — or the third space experience.

It is like living in a limbo, a twilight zone, a no man’s land. It is like being a ghost, haunting two worlds but never fully materializing in either. Take Past Lives, for example. The third space internalization is manifested in the characters' continuous negotiation and construction of their sense of self. Past Lives traces Nora (played as an adult by Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (played as an adult by Teo Yoo) initially tentative and then wholehearted reunion years later, as they reconcile the realities of their adult selves with their dreamily remembered youth in Korea.

These two films, Return to Seoul and Past Lives, while it seems to portray opposing genre, equally reflect on self-love, culture, choices made for us as children, the choices we make for ourselves, and the inevitable collateral damage, which includes the damage to ourselves.

Interestingly, Davy Chou in ‘Return to Seoul’ understands that there is no need to spell out and interject obvious cues of third space politics. It revels in the understanding of Korean identity as something explosive, volatile, and paradoxical, unbound by and irreducible to clean, acceptable symbols of South Korean cultural references. It’s not about cultural cues of Korean Pop, or soju’s and kimchi’s, but imperialism, as what I will briefly expound below.

The slow pacing and style of the film were very showing of the third space experience itself. She is caught between the vibrant and the dull, the familiar and the foreign, the loud and the quiet. Chaotic. Depressing. Colorful, but bleak. In the world of unfamiliar thoughts, she remains silent. Her facial features and Korean-ness were put into constant questioning. She pours her own alcohol even though she was told whispers of discourtesy. She laughs over a flustered boy, confessing his love for her. Even after a few years, she still gets confused by these things.

Return to Seoul spans nearly a decade as Freddie struggles for a sense of place in the world.

The film charts a stuttering discord between the estranged family members, unpicking complex emotional battlegrounds often hampered by belligerence and resentment. This impromptu detour paves a compelling identity-searching beyond what she bargained for. She finds herself in unfamiliar territory, where she has to confront her own fears, doubts, and hopes, and where she learns to appreciate the beauty and fragility of life.

But she’s a total wreck. Freddie is not the easiest person to root for. Nothing changes for her. After years of living in Seoul, she is not the protagonist to root for. Like a broken record, she repeated the cycle of pain. No matter how many times she changed her tune, her melody was still discordant. She had been through so much, but some scars never faded. She still returned to her old habits and wreaked havoc on everything around her. They say, “hurt people hurt people.”

Slow burn. Chou narrates Freddie’s long, uneasy journey of reconciling her dual heritage with close-up camerawork and patient writing. The film does not rush to a neat conclusion but lingers on the moments of doubt, confusion, and longing that Freddie experiences. The immersive cinematography of the film invites us to examine Park’s minutest facial expressions as she finds herself surrounded by people who look like her but from home, she feels remote and alienated.

The film is lost to the journey itself.

But how come I can understand her when she doesn’t even understand herself.

On that note, Return to Seoul is decisive in its journey. There is no well-determined end to the film because there’s no well-determined end point where Freddie’s journey is complete.

Korea’s unique divided national state is a constant source of inspiration for cinema. South Korea was one of the world’s largest exporters of adopted children between the ’50s and the early nineties. Many of those two hundred thousand or so children were brought into white American and European families, the fallout of which is still being unpacked.

The political history of the Korean War, and the West’s genocidal contribution to the Korean War, played a decisive role in Freddie’s life. It is a war that created a surplus of orphans, ripe for the picking by white families who saw them as trophies of their benevolence, not as victims of their violence. It is a war that mirrored the global order of exploitation and extraction, where the rich and powerful siphon off the resources, labor, and goods of the poor and oppressed, under the guise of charity and care.

William Safran offers a list of defining characteristics of diaspora: dispersal to two or more locations; collective mythology of homeland; alienation from host land; idealization of return to the homeland; and ongoing relationship with the homeland.[1]

Likewise, Kim Butler classifies the diasporas according to the following five dimensions: reasons for, and conditions of, the dispersal; relationship with the homeland; relationship with hostlands; interrelationships within communities of the diaspora; comparative studies of different diasporas.[2] Discussing Korean diasporic experiences and consciousness can contribute to our understanding of an incomplete world in which contemporary constructions and interactions between people, cultures, and nations are constantly in flux and where the transnational dis/continuity of human flow engenders issues of child, women, adoptee, and human rights.

In the global standing, Korea ranks fourth after China, Israel, and Italy in terms of population but first in regard to percentage of population. Fast forward. After Korea’s independence from Japanese imperial rule, the U.S. military governing power transformed Korean society into a modernized Western-style society establishing institutional systems in politics, economy, and education.

Subsequent to the devastation of the Korean War (1950–53), the South Korean-U.S. connection foregrounded a transnational adoption industry exporting orphans and relinquishing infants and children from half of the peninsula.

Return to Seoul is perhaps the film I’d never get tired of intellectualizing, aside from Bleak Night (lol).

Mainstream cinema already has it. How many times do we have to sit through another diaspora film where the protagonist finds purpose in going home? But surprisingly, Return to Seoul is way deeper. It honestly showed me the most raw and authentic experience of being an adopted daughter who came from another country, not completely knowing where your origins lie.

By the end of the film, we find Freddie at a piano, after realizing that her biological mother’s email is invalid. An email given by her mother to her after their first encounter.

This is another failed attempt at reconnecting with the past. So, she decides to sight-read the sheet music, figuring it out as she goes instead of depending on memory. It’s an awkward and difficult process, no doubt. Deeply heartbreaking.

You know your origin, but you still don’t know where you belong.

[1] William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1 (1991): 83–99

[2] Kim D. Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 10, no. 2 (2001): 189–219.