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Many teenagers and young adults struggle to figure out who they are and where they fit. And in the international drama Return to Seoul (Retour à Séoul), when one young woman returns to the country of her birth, she finds herself in a very complicated struggle to figure out where she belongs.
Return to Seoul follows a young woman on an impromptu search for identity. Freddie (Park Ji-min) was born in Korea and adopted by French parents, and she grew up on the French countryside before moving to Paris as a young adult. When her plans to travel to Japan for two weeks change at the last minute, she impulsively books a flight to Seoul instead. And as she makes new friends and immerses herself in this unfamiliar language and culture, she makes the decision to search for her biological parents.
As soon as she arrives in Korea, Freddie is faced with a crisis of identity. She looks Korean, but she doesn’t speak the language, and she laughs off cultural traditions. At the same time, she doesn’t look French, but her language and boldness seem foreign in Seoul. And as she struggles with these strange inconsistencies, it shakes her. Suddenly, she’s not so sure of herself.
Freddie spends the film—which spans eight years of her life—on unsteady ground. She meets her father and grandmother, who have spent the last 25 years wrestling with their feelings of guilt over giving her up. They immediately embrace her and welcome her home, but she remains quiet and distant, laughing off her father’s frequent texts, begging her for a relationship. But she also longs to hear from her mother, who ignores the adoption agency’s telegrams.
The film takes its time in telling the story, leaving viewers to come to their own conclusions on their own time. As Freddie struggles with her identity, she also struggles with relationships—and with the pull that her birth country has on her. No matter how she tries to separate herself, insisting that she’s French and not Korean, she keeps returning. And as the years pass, her behavior and her choices can be shocking and unexpected—and they don’t always make her an especially likable character. This all makes for a slow and challenging film—but also a fascinating study in the search for identity.
Return to Seoul definitely isn’t for everyone. It’s deliberate and sometimes difficult. But while the storytelling can sometimes be frustrating, the striking filmmaking and the character’s circumstances make for a thought-provoking film.
Return to Seoul arrives in theaters on January 27, 2023.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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