Review: In 'Return to Seoul,' a woman searches for identity in a movie that never goes where you expect

For a quiet movie, writer-director Davy Chou’s “Return to Seoul” roils up some powerful emotions in its telling of a young woman’s search for her birth parents and her own self-identity.

Frédérique Benoit, who goes by Freddie (played by Park Ji-min), was born in South Korea but was adopted by a French couple when she was a baby — and has been raised as a modern French woman. At 25, she makes an unexpected vacation trip to Seoul, where she parties with her new friend Tena (Guka Han) and some local twenty-somethings, and then goes to the adoption agency that most likely handled her case.

The adoption agency is under strict rules about contacting biological parents. The agency will send a telegram to the biological parent’s home address, and wait to hear if there’s a reply. After three telegrams, the agency cannot send another one for a year. 

When Freddie asks the agency to make contact, she gets a response from her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok). This leads to an uncomfortable family reunion, where Freddie and Tena not only meet the biological father, but his wife, his sister and his mother. Dad talks about Freddie staying to live with him permanently — which freaks Freddie enough that she and Tena get on the first bus back to Seoul.

Chou’s screenplay — which he wrote based on the life of his friend, Laure Badufle (who is credited as a script consultant) — takes a couple of timeline leaps, catching Freddie at later parts of her life. She goes through some changes, in occupation and attitude, but is still trying to sort out her relationship to the people and the place of her earliest days on Earth. 

Chou’s unembellished script never goes where you expect — and neither does Park Ji-min’s incredible performance. Acting in her first movie, Park captures the spectrum of conflicting emotions that Freddie is dealing with as she navigates the questions of her birth and where she will land in the divide between her Korean ancestry and her French upbringing. It’s a jagged, fiercely honest performance, one that resonates with anyone who’s asked themselves who they are in the world.

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‘Return to Seoul’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, March 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for brief drug use, nudity and language. Running time: 115 minutes; in French and Korean, with subtitles.