Photo caption: Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
As the brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping Return to Seoul opens, we meet a free-spirited young woman (Park Ji-min) with the decidedly non-Korean name Frederique Benoit. Freddie is French, having been adopted from Korea by a French couple as an infant. Freddie doesn’t speak Korean, doesn’t know anything about Korean culture, and is only in Korea because of a last minute pivot from some disrupted vacation travel.
Freddie travels for pleasure and loves to party – and party hard. She is certainly NOT prepared for a quest to find her biological parents, but an acquaintance gives her a tip, and she can’t resist following up. What follows is an exceptional and unpredictable personal journey told in four segments – the second five years after the first, the third and fourth just a year or two apart.
Return to Seoul features a screenplay without any hint of cliché and a stunning breakthrough performance by its lead actress.
Freddie is brash, impulsive and unfiltered. Her feelings about the circumstances of her adoption are authentic and complicated. She doesn’t seem either needy or resentful – but what is beneath the surface? After all, she does have a visceral distaste for celebrating her birthday.
Freddie is frequently impolite and often mistreats those who care for her with breathtaking awfulness; she dispatches one boyfriend with a line of staggering cruelty – and then repeats it..
As Freddie, Park Ji-min is a revelation in her FIRST FILM role. She’s on screen in every scene, and we’re always on the edge of our seat wondering how she’ll react – for better or for worse. We ‘re on Freddie’s roller coaster, and Park Ji-min is driving it.
Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Park Ji-min is a visual artist who often paints with latex. Like Freddie, she’s confident enough – in her first filmmaking – to have insisted on eschewing a blonde wig for a black leather wardrobe in the second segment because she saw the character of Freddie as a warrior. After a stunning, sure to be star-making performance in Return to Seoul, she says she’s now deciding whether to accept further acting gigs (and I sure hope she does). In the meantime, she’s become a spokesperson for Dior.
Park Ji-min moved with her Korean parents from Korea to France in her childhood. She heard of this film project from a friend who, like the character of Freddie, was adopted from Korea by French parents.
Writer-director Davy Chou is French-born of Cambodian parents. This is only his second feature, and it’s a near masterpiece primarily because Chou has created an entirety original and complex protagonist.
Freddie’s biological father is played by Oh Kwang-rok, a Korean actor of note, who delivers a heartfelt and sometimes smoldering performance.
I found Return to Seoul to be a thrilling experience, a better film than any of last year’s ten nominees for the Best Picture Oscar. The Wife, while moved by the penultimate scene, was much less impressed. She thought one music-related thread had been ignored for the middle of the film, and was underwhelmed by the ending.
Go see Return to Seoul at your arthouse theater – it’s the first Must See of 2023. I’ll let you know when it streams.