Blue in the Face

Standing in a tree-lined sports field. An island of green among redbrick.

“To me, you are the Sea”

And you feel seen. And you feel that you are the sea, and you will move through life thus.

Your thoughts will go like this:

I am calm but endlessly complex.

I am soft yet I have the power to destroy.

I am immutably myself, and only great forces of nature can change that.

You do not reach for these thoughts when nattering away with friends, or watching that TV show that so distracts you.

No, they rise in you when those moments have passed, when some weight bares down on you, and you think: I am indifferent, I am destructive, I am complex.

“You’re not literally the sea, but it’s true, you are sea-like to me”

You say this to yourself. You imagine waves and water churning inside.

And yet, every so often a little thought nags at you. A thought about a boat.

You wonder about turning to yourself, and saying:

“What if you’re not the sea, but instead a boat?”

Not so indifferent, destructive or complex.

But rigid, explicable and moved by a gentle breeze.

Maybe. But boat-like and sea-like though you may be, you are neither equally.

There is a scene in Return to Seoul in which the main character, Freddie, is in a night club. The camera stays mostly attached to Freddie’s performance and during this scene it struck me that the most interesting thing going on was the softness of the image.

There is another pair of moments: One in which Freddie listens to their biological Father’s autodidact piano composition, and another, at the end, where Freddie plays a piece on the piano themself. Not unlike the club scene, these moments jump out at me because of a particular effect or quality that is being added after the fact. When Freddie plays the piano, I don’t listen to the melody so much as the softness of the notes themselves.

It may have been director Davy Chou’s intention to create a film of these moments and interventions. However, if so, it seems to me the narrative felt arbitrary next to them. I would wager that those flares of something special were not the director’s priority but instead were secondary to the story, and unfortunately for/to me, the story had little to say.

There are some films where I feel I can move or have some flex in my critical perspective, so I can become the intended audience, or at least adjacent to them. In other films I think it is clear I am not the audience and in which case I don’t think a critique beyond ‘I am not the audience’ is of much use to anyone. I am not sure who Return to Seoul is intended for but in this case I’m going to pass on judging it further, and assume I am not them.