Park Ji-Min’s remarkable lead performance in 'Return to Seoul' elevates the withholding yet moving meditation on identity and culture to a masterwork. angelicabastien writes
There’s no cinematic terrain as potent as an actor’s face. Seeing on it a flexible configuration of internal needs, cultural mores, and wayward desires, writer-director Davy Chou understands this truth intimately with his film. He grounds his story in the contours and illuminations of lead Park Ji-min’s features and expressions in a debut performance so piercing it makes the entire film move like a breathing poem.
There are no grand speeches, no sudden or dramatic upheavals, no twinkling score to mawkishly pull at your heartstrings.carries itself with a gentle forcefulness. Language — the barriers and different effects of French, Korean, and, occasionally, English — becomes the method and medium to acknowledge the fractures inside Freddie, bringing up questions about how she sees herself and her place in the world.
Bodies in Chou’s film are positioned in ways that reveal these internal complications: Hands are held awkwardly, a head is placed on a lap for comfort, arms and hair fly through the air of a club in a fit of dancing that resembles emotional exorcism. When Freddie first meets her birth father and his family, seated for a meal in a quiet restaurant far from the neon hiss of Seoul, they feel one another out, happening upon bruises with every desperate touch.
But just when you think you have a handle on Freddie’s story and its careful rhythms, the film jumps forward two years. Freddie is now living in Seoul. Wearing oxblood lips and a raised collar that envelops her like a cocoon, she goes on a date with a much older white Frenchman, André . She’s momentarily open with him: “I’m 27 today.
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