Film of successive uprootings, the Return to Seoul of the Franco-Cambodian Davy Chou comes out these days in physical format... What to (re)immerse in this feature film proposed in the selection A certain look of the Cannes Festival 2022.
Lost in translation
At random unexpected changes in air program due to a typhoon, Freddie redirects his Japanese trip to the South Korean coast. Twenty-five years after she was born there, she again marched the land of her native country, left rushing after being adopted in France. Ignoring all local customs and not speaking the language, she will throw herself to herself lost as a result of her origins, shaking all her plans of life through.
Film emerging from a personal experience Davy Chou, which, during a screening of his documentary Sleep In South Korea eventually accompanied a friend to a dinner where she found her biological father, himself Korean. Chambouled by the amazements of this meal, which was shared with the relationships prevented by the distance of an unknown language and culture, Davy Chou decided to make it a fictional feature film.
Willed indeed
If it is understood during the course of history that Freddie will cease in his emancipated young years to leave France to get lost on the Japanese peninsula, the typhoon returning his flight to the Korean coast seems only a good excuse well awaited to finally embark on the quest for his origins. Japan had a magnetism on it in that it was that « Near Korea » where she could touch the exotic lands from which she came without directly facing her own country, where inexorably issues of origin would have arisen. However, this simple blow of the weather spell materializes in the film not as a constraint, but as the providential manna, the pichenette of destiny allowing it to finally face reality: if it so often exiled to the land of the rising sun, it was just to get closer to the place that had seen it born.
A constraint immediately diverted to his advantage, therefore, mechanism that will eventually mark the entire course of Freddie... Whether it is cultural injunctions, old past promises, societal requirements, language barriers, etc. Freddie will always be able to circumvent the imperative, to remove from the conventions, to re-invent herself, in the image of the mues sequence that she will perform throughout the film. A cultural misunderstanding in a restaurant, she managed to emulate an embarrassing but tenacious connection between several tables of perfect strangers, who supported her friendship with Tena (Guka Han), his performer for the entire film. A strange ass-plan with a much older man, she will create a vocation and a whole career. And the examples could continue to sink here so much the construction of this character materializes in these constant defeats of destiny.
Ghost woman
« With one finger slap, I could make you disappear from my life... »
This sentence smeared by Freddie to one of his lovers who became a serious relationship could appear at the frontispiece of Return to Seoul, as this notion of voluntary eclipse passes through the feature film. Escape from the daily routine, from the routine, to become again this unknown who debunks in one knows where to go further... Jumping on foot together on the pivots of destiny, being caught by changes in trajectories, slipping into the skin of another, as if abandoning her birth and then her adoption had conditioned her to these constant changes of identity, which she would unconsciously repeat afterwards.
A state that detachs it from conformation to societal injunctions, since when one is no one – or constantly someone else – no need to fear the other's gaze. That a gesture seems inappropriate, that a custom be flouted, that a smile expected ultimately remains only a crumbling, impassive face, none of it has any consequence to the one who has no name, face, identity. To the one who will only be a bed left empty the next day or a phone number only spitting a tone synonymous with absence... Freddie will also be able to amuse any relationship at the very moment when the bonds begin to ligify, as soon as a closeness the force to vulnerability: that a lover declares to him his flame, that a group of friends decides to celebrate his birthday, that a father cries for the years of absence, is far too much for a woman who would only wish to be a ghost.
Five star Casting
Rworking in Seoul is the story of an acceptance, of the passage on an unconscious but deep trauma, which the Franco-Cambodian Davy Chou himself seems to know well. And his film to be built in mirror with the beginning and end decor of the reception of a hotel, the ritual of rigour, the exchange of courteous but meaningless smiles and ultimately the key strained towards a room where no one is again to be.
Passionate in its background, formally magnified, Return to Seoul is especially the revelation of an actress who radiates the screen, Park Ji-min. Perfect in chameleon sometimes silent, sometimes emitting a communicative energy, she literally carries on her shoulders Davy Chou's project alongside Guka Han (Tena) and Oh Kwang-rok (the biological father, already met in several films of Park Chan-wook as Old Boy or Lady Vengeance). In short, his latest release in physical format is the opportunity to (re)dive into this remarkable feature of the past year!
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 115 min
Release Date: 04 July 2023
Video format : 576p/25 - 1.85
Soundtrack : Korean Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
I think I'm going to get the Blu-ray Spectrum Films because this singular work looks striking...