Return to Seoul

Perth Festival Lotterywest Films

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

When I was a precocious 14-year-old schoolboy in Lower Flügelhorn my parents allowed me (possibly unwisely) to go on a one-year student exchange program to Melbourne, Australia, where I was billeted with the family of my future friend and colleague Humphrey Bower. I didn’t speak English but learned the language and culture immersively. Without realising it at the time I was repeating my mother’s childhood exile from Austria with her parents which took place before the Nazi occupation in 1938. History, as Marx said, repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Later I would continue this pattern by going to Cambridge to study philosophy, and finally by going into voluntary exile from Austria after the election of the far-right coalition government in 2000. 

 

Davy Chou is a Cambodian-French filmmaker whose parents emigrated to Paris before most of their remaining family were killed by the Khmer Rouge. He ‘returned’ to Cambodia for the first time to make Golden Slumbers (2012), a documentary featuring relics and interviews with witnesses from the ‘golden’ era of Cambodian filmmaking that preceded the Khmer Rouge regime under which over 400 films were lost or destroyed and most the artists who worked on them were killed or fled. His subsequent film Diamond Island (2016) featured a cast of young debut actors and dealt with a teenager from a rural province in Cambodia who comes to Phnom Penh to earn money as a construction worker on a half-finished luxury development and is reunited with a long-lost older brother. 

 

Return to Seoul (2022) similarly deals with themes of trauma, loss, migration, reunion, heritage, identity and coming to terms with the past (the original English title was All The People I’ll Never Be). Freddie (a mesmerising debut from Ji Min Park) is a free-spirited but emotionally dissociated 25-year-old French-Korean adoptee who returns to her country of origin for the first time since she was a baby and embarks on a journey of discovery that includes learning the language and culture and eventually seeking out her birth-parents. Chou has explained in interviews that he based Freddie on a French-Korean adoptee-friend who accompanied him to South Korea for the screening of Golden Slumbers in Busan and was reunited with her birth parents; and that the character was further developed in collaboration with Park; but that the film (co-written with Claire Maugendre) also draws on his own life.  

 

Park’s performance drives the film, her alternately radiant or coldly expressionless face in almost every frame, half-filling it in close-up or carefully placed as if almost lost or forgotten in carefully composed wide shots. Her co-star is Seoul itself and other locations in South Korea where most of the film is shot apart from a final scene in Romania, all evocatively captured in luminous colours by cinematographer Thomas Favel and fluidly edited by Dounia Sichov. The city changes mood and identity in the course of the film as dramatically as Freddie herself, who in a series of time-jumps over the ensuing years transforms from casual slacker to glamorous femme fatale to high-class arms dealer and finally globe-wandering backpacker, seeking or offering and then rejecting or withholding affection from random strangers, lovers, friends, colleagues and family along the way.

 

Return to Seoul resists the temptation of psychological, sociological or moral commentary about the ‘issue’ of adoption in favour of a meditation on the elusive nature of identity and belonging, meaning and purpose, being and desire. Freddie ceases to be a case-history and becomes an everywoman perpetually trapped by her own and others’ demands for love. The final shot of her pausing to sight-read Bach’s despairing supplication Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ at a hotel foyer piano in Romania on her birthday before leaving without even checking in – and after learning that an email to her birth mother has bounced – is an exquisite image of existential abandonment and transcendental homelessness. 

 

*

 

Return to Seoul screens at Somerville Auditorium, University of Western Australia, as part of Perth Festival Lotterywest Films from Mon 12 to Sunday 18 December.

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the paraphenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Paraphänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s student and literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.