The implacable forces of nature, nurture and destiny are what this movie grapples with; it is a really emotional and absorbing drama about adoption with terrific performances (many from nonprofessional first-timers) and compelling soundtrack musical cues. Franco-Cambodian film-maker Davy Chou directs, co-writing the screenplay with artist Laure Badufle, a Korean adoptee brought up in France whose personal story inspired the film.
Park Ji-min makes her acting debut in a role that mirrors her own life as well as Badufle’s: a Korean with adoptive French parents. She plays Freddie Benoît, a footloose twentysomething who on a whim comes on a trip to Seoul, checks into a hostel for foreigners and imperiously decides that the polite, French-speaking receptionist Tena, subtly played by author Guka Han, will be her submissive best friend. Freddie is smart, stylish, a badass and force of nature who impulsively invites everyone in a local cafe to join her at her table where she is holding court with Tena and Tena’s shy friend Jiwan (Kim Dong-Seok); she later seduces and then airily rejects him when the poor infatuated guy pathetically declares his eternal love.
But Freddie’s confidence wobbles when Tena tells her she could, if she wanted, contact her biological mother and father in South Korea, and the film allows us to realise that this of course was what Freddie always intended at some subconscious level. Through an adoption agency, she discovers that her Korean mum and dad are divorced; she finds her father easily enough, a heartbreakingly sweet-natured guy played by veteran actor Oh Kwang-rok, now remarried with teen children and devastated with the suppressed guilt at the abandonment which her reappearance has brought back to the surface. Boozy and maudlin, the dad piteously asks her to stay with his family, starts almost stalking her, begging for forgiveness, virtually as pathetic as Jiwan.
But just as she refuses to be part of her father’s life, her mother refuses to see her, and a terrible question permeates the entire film: could Freddie have inherited from this absent woman her egotism and creativity, her talent for seduction, disruption and moving like a whirlwind through people’s lives? And if she can’t track down her mother, now a ghost beyond reach, does this mean she will never understand her own identity and the meaning of her own existence? It is a piercingly strange and indeed tragic predicament which the film coolly tracks through eight years of Freddie’s life; this is gripping storytelling, and a great performance from Park Ji-min.
• Return to Seoul is released on 5 May in UK and Irish cinemas, and on 7 July on Mubi.
