Return to Seoul (Davy Chou, 2022) (Patreon)

One of the year’s most acclaimed films, Return to Seoul is also notably absent within the so-called “discourse.” It seems that a lot of people like it, but don’t have a lot to say, perhaps because they believe that its quality is self-evident. I did not care from director Davy Chou’s previous film Diamond Island, and I will freely admit that Return to Seoul is an improvement. But even its champions acknowledge that this is a derivative movie, one that draws on some pretty obvious sources. There is one scene shot through a car window at night that is almost an exact replica from a shot in Lost in Translation. The complications that arise from drunken Korean masculinity are highly reminiscent of Hong Sang-soo, although I’m not sure he’s ever been this humorless.

But the single most frequent point of comparison is Millennium Mambo, and the flaws of Chou’s film are strikingly evident when considered against Hou’s. In Mambo, it did not matter that Shu Qi’s character had no backstory, because by and large, Millennium Mambo was not a character-driven film. The protagonist was more of an idea, part of an overall temporal drift that luxuriated in the freedom that comes with making no permanent bonds. By contrast, Freddie (Park Ji-min) is self-destructive and consistently unpleasant, going out of her way to scuttle any potential human connection. Why is she so damaged? We don’t know, but Return to Seoul would seem to suggest that this is just what happens to children of international adoptions, because what else in her psyche do we have to go on?

This is a film of concepts and ideas, thuddingly obvious ones that telegraph their meaning so aggressively that, ironically, they seem to congratulate the viewer for noticing them. Freddie is French but looks Korean. She speaks French and some English, and all of her interactions go through a translator (Guka Han), all the better to emphasize her distance from everyone around her. In the opening scene, she is admonished not to fill her own soju cup, because it’s a breach of Korean drinking protocol. Upon learning this, she does it again more blatantly. See? She looks Korean, but is a Westernized shit-disturber, unfazed by the cultural mores around her. Once the main plot kicks in – she is trying to find her birth parents – she is disturbed by the sudden expectations placed upon her, in particular by her father (Oh Gwang-rok), who seems to think he can just instantly step into the parental role as though he were entitled to it.

For Freddie’s part, she bitterly rejects him (at least at first), but what exactly did she expect? Coming to South Korea, and finding her birth parents, were both impulsive decisions, and they have resulted in her blustering into already settled lives. This shifts somewhat over time, since Chou leapfrogs over about a decade using multi-year temporal ellipses. But these only exacerbate the main problem with Return to Seoul. Freddie doesn’t know who she is, and neither does Chou, and it’s unclear why we are expected to care.