Cambodian-French director Davy Shu’s movie “Back to Seoul”, about a Korean girl who is adopted by a French family as a baby, has been released in Russia. From a brief description one can get the impression that the film is a family melodrama. A beautiful and touching story about a family reunion, a return to roots. But if everything was that simple, would it be worth talking about this movie?
Of course, there is a family history in the movie, as there is also a picture of traditional Korean family relationships – quite rigid and hierarchically constructed. But it is precisely this seriousness that is incompatible with the historical and political aspects of the context surrounding the plot.
Why did a Korean girl enter a French family when she had both parents, each with a job, a house, and a grandmother there? However, the Korean girl was sent to France. Instead, they were given to a special center that distributed the babies to adoptive parents.
The world information space in that part of the Korean Peninsula has been organized approximately as follows for the last 70 years. A clear dichotomy was built: North Korea – poverty, hunger, dictatorship, corruption; South Korea – prosperity, technology, democracy, capitalism, prosperity.
At the same time, most South Korean leaders were convicted of corruption, and Park Chung Hee, the author of the “Korean economic miracle”, was shot dead by the head of his own main intelligence agency, because “he is a dictator and an obstacle to democracy.” Complicated.
From the 1960s to the early 21st century, South Korea seems to have been the main supplier of adopted babies to Western countries where fertility problems had already begun at that time. And Korean families unable to feed their children gave them to adoption centers in hopes that the children would be better off in the West – at least, according to them, there was enough food there. It is clear that this process was at first due to the search for acceptable living conditions for orphaned children after the Korean War, and then it somehow continued to lurk. If a childless European or American family needed a child, it was quickly found through an adoption center in South Korea. And as already mentioned, they took children from full families, not orphans at all. While statistics vary, the movie only references a document from one adoption center that shows that, accordingly, 221,000 babies were transferred to the West.
And now the film, which came out of a family melodrama, is already turning into a real historical tragedy. What is the difference between tragedy and drama? Something irreparable happens in tragedy, something whose consequences eliminate any possibility of a normal development of further events.
The protagonist of the movie spontaneously ends in Seoul, remembers that he is Korean and starts looking for a meeting with his family. He does not speak Korean, no one in his family speaks French. They meet and cry. Everyone is crying except the hero girl. He does not understand who these people are, how to behave with them, how and what to talk to them. And people – father, grandmother, sisters, aunt – sincerely apologize to her, ask her to stay in Korea so that she can find a Korean husband, live with them, learn Korean language. And all this, of course, through hiccups and excuses. His father tells him that back then – 20 years ago – Korea was a very different place and they wanted a better life for him. And he reluctantly lies, yes, everything was provided to him, thanks, his childhood in France was wonderful. But from the understanding that nothing can be fixed, nothing can be reversed, a paralyzing sense of incompetence and a kind of existential fear pass through the curtain. The person does not have a home and never has been. But it won’t be, as we’ll see later.
The hero truly connects his later life with both Korea and France at the same time, but is marginalized by external prosperity. Marginal – in the sense of a person cut from the roots. Any root. He cannot fully settle in Korea because he does not understand the customs, language, cultural codes, and calls his family poisonous. But he cannot return to France, because his ties with his parents gradually weaken and crack, and this orphanhood and restlessness, which has become a part of his identity, poisons him. The feeling of homelessness has been replaced by the feeling of home.
The girl drinks, dances, smells something, swallows something. And there is no place for him to rest. That’s why she finds herself on the outskirts of Seoul street in the morning.
It would seem that a meeting with the mother can solve something, somehow affect the course of events, heal a sick orphan soul. But only the mother cries. And the girl is crying. And everything is clear, but tears will not change anything, neither in the past nor in the future. A man was once taken from his homeland, and it turned out to be more traumatic than could be imagined. A tropical flower was uprooted, transplanted into the tundra, and then they tried to plant it back in the tropics. But he cannot settle here or there. It seems he has many parents, both Korean and French, but there is no homeland and everything loses its meaning. It remains an orphan. And to isolate at least one good thing from this tragedy, to feel this orphanage as bliss – to travel, run, jump, dance and drink. Because it turns out that the real mother crying on her shoulder left her the wrong email address. All the threads are broken.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.