Return to Seoul review

The film’s about identity, yes, but it’s a Western movie with a Western lead character, and her journey is of a Western person attempting to find themself, which is what makes the movie kind of sad. She cannot become Korean because she’s trying to do so through a Western lens.

by Harley Stapleton-Brister

Freddie is a young French woman, ethnically Korean, who has returned to Seoul in South Korea, her birth country that she’s never known. Only existing there as a baby, she doesn’t have any basis on which to connect with the culture, and so falls in with young French-speaking locals who help her to find some footing. She seeks to find her birth parents, visiting the office of the adoption agency to which they gave her 25 years prior, who then passed her on to her French parents-to-be. She requests that the agency puts her in contact with her birth parents. They send out a telecom to both, which gets replied to by her birth father (who remains unnamed throughout the the film) and his side of her now divorced family of origin. She travels outside of Seoul to meet him and his family; slightly uncomfortable, humorous goings-on ensue between them after she agrees to spend three nights with them. Freddie then becomes irritated with her birth father’s newfound over-attachment to her, thus, her birth mother, who refused to see her via a telecom through the adoption agency, it becomes Freddie’s mission to meet and reconnect with.

Have you seen the film Lost in Translation? It’s about American filmmakers making a whisky commercial in Japan for the Japanese market. It focusses on their lostness in a culture alien to them. The leads are unable to connect with those around them culturally and often linguistically. Humour ensues from this. In scenes, Return to Seoul plays like said film but with a change of skin colour from the lead, Freddie. She’s French, arrogant, libertine, and has little patience for Korea, its men, its cultural attitudes. She stands above the narrative and the country on her voyage to connect with what she was forced to be distant from.

The film’s about identity, yes, but it’s a Western movie with a Western lead character, and her journey is of a Western person attempting to find themself, which is what makes the movie kind of sad. She cannot become Korean because she’s trying to do so through a Western lens.

Why did I find the funny scenes difficult? Is it ok to laugh at Koreans if through the lens of an ethnically Korean woman? Would Lost in Translation be made today? Is this how we tell Lost in Translation today? The film is honestly good but comes especially recommended if you like the new trend of douchebag protagonists in European cinema (alla The Worst Person in the World). There’s some fantastically intelligent stuff here which unfortunately must be swallowed with a brimmed tablespoon of insufferable individualism. Perhaps that’s the point.

The film is now in cinemas and available on Mubi July 7th.