Earlier this year I visited my home city of Johannesburg after seven years away, to find – as I do every time I return – everything at once the same and entirely different: old houses and haunts nestled just as I left them, but surrounded by unfamiliar spikes of development and decay. “You can’t go home again” goes the old phrase, but we can and we do, the warmth of nostalgia constantly battling the shock of the new.
That tension is why homecoming is a such a recurrent, irresistible theme in the movies, though Davy Chou’s lovely, glimmering Return to Seoul (Mubi) offers a less common angle on that bittersweet pang. Its Gen-Z protagonist, Freddie (a wonderful Park Ji-min), is searching for any sense of her past in the South Korean capital, not trying to match it to memories she already has, for she left the place as an infant, having been adopted and raised in France. The film covers not one visit to her homeland, but a cyclical eight-year process in which the young woman, erratic and mercurial, works to map herself on to the city, finding a new self in her roots. It’s a perceptive and consistently surprising work – one to make anyone whose life has been scattered across different countries consider the lost-and-found patchwork of their own identity.
