An ambivalent, accusatory depiction of intercountry adoption, Return to Seoul mines South Korea’s controversial adoption history to craft a smart if maddening character study. The remarkable newcomer Ji-Min Park is Freddie, a grown-up French national and one of at least 200,000 South Korean children who have been sent overseas since 1953.
When her flight to Toyko is cancelled, she arrives in Seoul by accident. Or at least that’s what she tells her parents. Whether carousing loudly, imposing on strangers, screaming or being plain rude, Freddie is quickly revealed as a bad actor in her own life. Her translator, Tena (Guka Han), valiantly attempts to soften the blow for listeners.
Upon returning to the country where she was born, Freddie insists that she hasn’t come in search of her biological parents, only to make her way to the adoption agency. One telegram later and her remorseful biological father (Park Chan-wook regular Oh Kwang-rok) appears. He has long since split from Freddie’s mother and is remarried with children. He pleads with Freddie to stay in South Korea and find a husband. She stays but ghosts her dad. Over the coming years she sends unanswered periodic messages to her biological mother, flits about, and, in one thundering metaphorical development, goes to work for an arms-dealing ex-lover.
A supportive boyfriend is summarily dismissed for a perceived faux pas, and Freddie returns to ill-advised hookups and alleyways. Freddie’s style shifts from backpacking casual to vamp leather are as unpredictable and attention-seeking as everything else about her. Discontented and drifting, she’s poignantly, perversely never at home. Neither does she implode entirely, although writer-director Davy Chou’s film can feel like a slow-motion car crash.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
“You are a really sad person,” Tena tells her after Freddie makes an unwanted pass.
The cinematographer Thomas Favel picks out twilight tableaux and seedy neons to reflect the heroine’s restlessness. Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset’s score is similarly squally as she aimlessly wanders through life.
Return to Seoul makes an interesting dialectic with another Cannes 2022 premiere. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker glossed over a prostitute’s pregnancy and baby-selling to find humanism in the grim business of human trafficking. Chou’s film, which was inspired by a journey taken to Korea with an adopted friend, excavates the darkness in Frankie’s superficial success story. Unhappy viewing for would-be western adoptive parents.
