Screening in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, Return to Seoul is a sensitive and moving drama that follows a young woman in search of her birth parents.
Frédérique Benoît (Park Ji-min) is French. The accent, the demeanor, the culture…everything about her is French. But not quite. The one we called Freddie is of Asian descent and more specifically Korean.
Arriving in Seoul, she wants to know why and how she was adopted by her parents and, of course, who her birth parents are. With her friend Tena (Guka Han), she makes contact with the Hammond center that managed her adoption. Freddie discovers the intricacies of the laws of his native country, the telegrams that need to be sent to the birth parents to find out if they want to meet their child, and that’s how he meets his father (Oh Kwang-rok).
Directed and written by Franco-Vietnamese Davy Chou, this Return to Seoul had the working title All the People I’ll Never Be, which loosely translates to All These People I’ll Never Be. a metaphor for adoption, for that secret rift between two cultures, two families… and the eternal debate between the innate and the acquired.
We follow Freddie for eight years and show her in all her doubts, her fragility, her contradictions, her revolt and her misunderstandings in the face of an – admittedly supposed – culture of origin, whose codes she ignores. And the relationship with his father is written and filmed with a rare emotional finesse.
While “Return to Seoul” suffers from some length and some narrative awkwardness (particularly breaking Freddie’s journey into three distinct stages), Park Ji-min’s performance elevates the feature film and makes it an important work on the psychology of adopted children.