Nationalist Ghosts in a Trans-national Text: Reading Return to Seoul Through A Petal
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This essay analyzes Davy Chou’s Retour à Séoul (Return to Seoul) (2022) through Jang Sun-woo’s Kkonnip (A Petal) (1996), showing how this earlier text can work to illuminate the more recent film by bringing in specifically nationalist meanings to this otherwise deeply transnational story. Moreover, using Roland Barthes’s idea of the “scriptable” (“writerly”) text and David Bordwell’s conception of art cinema structural ambiguity, this reading offers social and political interpretations of both Return to Seoul’s story as well as its lead character, giving more relevant meanings beyond a generalized “search for identity” cited by so many reviewers. This includes a recontextualization of Return to Seoul’s references to Korean music, history, geography, and gender relations, all of which can be interpreted with greater specificity. More than just nostalgia, the rock music used in the film, like in A Petal, has a linkage to the political repression of the recent past, as does the geographical setting of Jeolla province. All of this adds greater resonance to the key gender dynamics of both texts, in which young women deal with problematic fathers and absent mothers in the context of colonial repression.
Abstract
This essay analyzes Davy Chou’s Retour à Séoul (Return to Seoul) (2022) through Jang Sun-woo’s Kkonnip (A Petal) (1996), showing how this earlier text can work to illuminate the more recent film by bringing in specifically nationalist meanings to this otherwise deeply transnational story. Moreover, using Roland Barthes’s idea of the “scriptable” (“writerly”) text and David Bordwell’s conception of art cinema structural ambiguity, this reading offers social and political interpretations of both Return to Seoul’s story as well as its lead character, giving more relevant meanings beyond a generalized “search for identity” cited by so many reviewers. This includes a recontextualization of Return to Seoul’s references to Korean music, history, geography, and gender relations, all of which can be interpreted with greater specificity. More than just nostalgia, the rock music used in the film, like in A Petal, has a linkage to the political repression of the recent past, as does the geographical setting of Jeolla province. All of this adds greater resonance to the key gender dynamics of both texts, in which young women deal with problematic fathers and absent mothers in the context of colonial repression.