'Return to Seoul': the fascination of the Korean wave in a story of interracial adoptees

South Korea is so fashionable in the West that it seems that everything that smacks of the Asian country is likely to become a success and, even more, to be a benchmark of quality.

And yet it is not so at all.

There are not a few pigs in a poke that the Korean wave has cast us in both cinema, music and television, but luckily it is not the case of the enigmatic and enveloping Return to Seoul, a film

personal self-discovery about identity that, In any case, it brings together such a rich diversity of origins, in the extrinsic aspects of the production and in the intrinsic aspects of the story itself, that perhaps it is this complexity that causes its global fascination.

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On the one hand, Davy Chou, its director, is a 39-year-old Frenchman, the son of Cambodians who immigrated to France immediately before the arrival of the communist dictatorship of the Khmer Rouge, and raised in silence and ignorance about what happened in the land of their fathers.

On the other, the story is based on the personal experience of a friend of the director, born in Korea and adopted by a French couple, who returned to Seoul as an adult to meet her parents again, in the presence of Chou himself.

Personal experiences, the interior itself and the desire for understanding are thus merged in a work marked in its form by the Korean pop songs that accompany the twenty-something protagonist, delicate and captivating music, and in the background by the contrast between Europe and Asia with respect to traditions and ways of being,

Frédérique Benoît, which is the name of the girl, is physically Asian, but she couldn't be more French, more European, more direct, less accommodating.

In front of her, a culture that could have been hers, which ends up messing up her existence.

The manners regulated to exhaustion, with elusive glances and even submissiveness of the Orientals contrast with her impetus, with her overwhelming personality.

And, best of all, that search process is narrated by Chou in the most unexpected way.

Despite its melodramatic soap opera base, it always flees from the obvious to end up embracing the unpredictable. Even in its elliptical narration, with two jumps of a few years from the first meeting with the father, which cause a suggestive discomfort, also marked by a minimal depth of field that reflects the distance between the girl and her origins.

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With the only obstacle for the viewer being a certain slowdown in the pace of the narration in the initial part of the story, due to the continuous translations between the characters —from the girl's native French to the Korean that she neither speaks nor understands—, the Chou's film begins as a binge of alcohol and youth sex that can lead the moviegoer all the way back to some of Wong Kar-Wai's early films, but then slides down deeply authentic paths.

Those of the uncertainty of not knowing who you are or where you are going, and of not seeing yourself reflected in the mirror of yours.

The emotional imbalance of interracial adoptees, in a universe that they are not only unaware of, but that makes them feel like they are in no man's land.

return to seoul

Address:

Davy Chou.

Cast:

Park Ji-min, Oh Kwang-rok, Kim Sun-young, Guka Han. 

Genre:

drama.

Korea, 2022.

Duration:

115 minutes.

Premiere: March 24.

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