In one of the first scenes of “Return to Seoul,” the striking second film by French Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou, and Cambodia’s 2022 Oscar entry, Freddie (Park Ji-min), a French woman who has just landed in Seoul, gets to know her new Korean friends over shots of soju. As she boldly pours her own drink (frowned upon in Korean etiquette) she casually tells them about her approach to life, which she describes as “sight reading,” as in music — learning the signs, how to read them and then plunging into the unknown. Little does she know how much sight reading she will do over the course of an eight-year personal odyssey of self-discovery, on a restless search for identity.
In the restaurant, inspired, Freddie rallies several disparate groups of young people, bringing them together with her easy swagger. Freddie is bold, daring, possessed of a mischievous smirk and that certain cool French je ne sais quoi. Adopted from Korea as a baby, she looks like everyone else, but she doesn’t act Korean, rebuffing formalities and expected behavior. She’s forthright to the point of being aggressive; she dances and moves and drinks and speaks with abandon, not caring about what other people think, or if they are hurt by her almost brutal sense of independence.
Freddie landed in Korea impulsively — there were no flights to Japan due to a typhoon — but when she’s there she decides to look up her biological parents, eventually meeting her father (Oh Kwang-rok) and his family. But as a wild and sullen 20-something, she is unreceptive to their sorrow, grief and regret. Their trauma is not the same, and as a strident French woman, she is unwilling to be the kind of dutiful Korean daughter she may have been in another life.
