The question’s simple enough. “How long do you want to stay?” the hotel clerk asks Freddie, the 25-year-old French citizen of Korean descent checking in at the beginning of the low-keyed marvel that is “Return to Seoul.” Not sure, she says. A couple of weeks, maybe.
Given the name Frédérique by her adoptive French parents, Freddie, played by Park Ji-min in a remarkable feature debut, has returned to Korea more or less on impulse. Across the 8-year span of the storyline, writer-director Davy Chou never seems to be dictating or signposting Freddie’s next move, or change in hairstyle, or emotional frame of mind. Rather, “Return to Seoul” unfolds as one of the rare movies that feels thoughtful and observant every minute, without tidy summations of feeling.
It rightly has been described as an adoption story. Quickly ingratiating herself with the more demure hotel clerk, Tena (Guka Han), roughly her age, it’s clear Freddie has a way with easy and often temporary friendship, her easy-come, easy-go attitude masking a melancholy wariness. The topic of Freddie’s birthparents, whom she has not known since the first month of her life, comes up eventually, in between the new friends’ engagement in Seoul nightlife.
Freddie inquires with a Seoul adoption agency to learn something about the parents who put her up for adoption. She learns her birth name is Yeon-hee, which means “docile and joyous.” The slow-dawning, disbelieving smile with which this cool, guarded woman greets this information is perfect. Throughout “Return to Seoul,” Chou encourages every true and authentic performance impulse in the film’s crucial portrayal.
In some ways, Chou’s film, his second feature, is procedural. Freddie, and the audience, learn she must contact her birth parents separately through the agency and wait to hear if they’re willing to meet. Without giving much away (the story is never dependent on twists or surprises), Freddie hears back initially from her father (Oh Kwang-rok, a veteran of many Park Chan-wook’s films). Like his birth daughter, he drinks too much; with his now-wife and kids, he lives a life fueled by heartache. Now that Freddie has established contact, his heart hurts all the more. Freddie does not speak Korean; she is French, though her father wishes otherwise.
All the while, across several years, Freddie’s yearning to connect with her birth mother lingers like a phantom memory. Communication is not easy in this story; when she visits her father, Freddie’s aunt translates the often anguished expressions of regret the father wishes to share, while Freddie’s friend from Seoul, along for the trip, takes pains to tone down some of Freddie’s blunt rejoinders, in the name of Korean propriety and tradition.
It’s a gorgeously photographed film, full of images of nocturnal Seoul and coastal South Korea we seldom see on screen. Cinematographer Thomas Favel treats the shape-shifting, identity-changing Freddie not as a glamorous cipher, but as a charismatic personality in constant flux, who leaves behind a fair amount of chaos wherever she goes. She returns to Seoul three times in “Return to Seoul,” and somehow it makes apt psychological sense that, by the end, she has changed her look again, along with giving up alcohol and red meat — while also having become an international arms dealer. (Her employer, a fellow Frenchman she meets in Seoul on the second of three returns, is played by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing.)
This is what makes “Return to Seoul” far richer than the average “problem” drama: It treats Freddie not as a problem to be solved, but as a peripatetic life to be followed. What begins as two weeks in another town, in search of the past Freddie never knew, becomes a reminder that there are feelings, longings, connections in life that remain not impossible, but certainly elusive, and precarious.
Filmmaker Chou, who worked closely with Park Ji-min as the script developed, was born in France to Cambodian-born parents. His relationship with his parents’ homeland, he has said, “was similar to Freddie’s relationship with South Korea at the start of the film.” Chou also has said he “questioned my legitimacy to tell this story.” He needn’t have. Perhaps starting from that position of doubt led to the care, and the consistent, unexpected details, to be found everywhere in “Return to Seoul.”
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'RETURN TO SEOUL'
MPAA rating: R (for brief drug use, nudity and language)
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Running time: 1:58
How to watch: Now in theaters
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