Go back to your roots, we’re always told, and you’ll find your heart’s true home. But in Davy Chou’s daring and mesmeric Return to Seoul, an adoptee’s search for her birth parents tears open wounds and unearths neither meaning nor resolution. Freddie (Park Ji-Min) is in her mid-twenties, a French woman adopted from South Korea at birth. She finds herself in Seoul after a trip to Tokyo is disrupted by a typhoon. That’s the excuse she gives to her adoptive mother back home, at least, having kept her entirely in the dark about this unforeseen odyssey.
Freddie insists to all, in fact, that she isn’t even here to track down her birth parents. She’s happy to wander, to draw strangers into her orbit with bottles of soju and a charming recalcitrance when it comes to local customs. They tell her it’s rude to fill up her own glass. She pauses, chews over the request, and then gleefully ignores it. Yet, soon enough, Freddie walks through the door of the adoption agency that processed her through their system over two decades ago. Requests to meet are issued to her birth parents. Her father (Oh Kwang-rok) responds. Her mother does not. He’s a drink-addled wreck, too desperate in his regrets to consider Freddie’s own discomforts. He wants her to move in with his family, marry a Korean man, and learn the language.
