'Return to Seoul' explores the universal desire to find belonging. But don't expect answers

There’s the quote that says it’s not what happens to you but how you react that matters.

In “Return to Seoul,” 25-year-old Parisian Frédérique Benoît (Park Ji-Min), aka Freddie, copes with learning about her Korean heritage during a spontaneous trip to South Korea. And the journey to finding herself and accepting her background is anything but linear.

Freddie was born Yeon-Hee in Jeonju in the late ‘80s. She was sent to an adoption center by her birth parents as an infant and then to France, where she was adopted by a couple. Despite arriving in Seoul with no travel plans or familiarity with Korean culture, Freddie ultimately spends her two-week trip learning about her biological family.

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Don’t look for resolution in 'Return to Seoul'

The coming-of-age film, which debuted at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, was inspired by director Davy Chou’s friend, Laure Badufle’s experiences as a Korean adoptee in France.

Like Badufle, Freddie struggles to accept a long-lost part of her identity that is revealed to her. The receptionist at the Seoul hostel she stays in, Tena (Guka Han), suggests going to Hammond Adoption Center, where many Korean adoptees go to track down their biological parents. Though Freddie’s parents have her adoption documents back home in France, Hammond is where she learns her origin story as the daughter of a woman from Jeonju and a man from Gunsan.

When she eventually meets her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok) and his family, she is ill at ease with their mealtime prayers and desperation to connect with her. Their bone-deep remorse for sending her away becomes suffocating. Freddie is standoffish, even seemingly repulsed by their reception, yet at times patient with her aunt and grandmother as they communicate via translator.

The translator, Tena, bridges not only the language gap but also the cultural by smoothing out Freddie’s bluntness with more polite interpretations of her words.

Freddie acts like she didn’t ask for any of this. And, in a way, she didn’t. It wasn’t her choice to grow up far from her biological family as one of more than 200,000 children who were put up for international adoption in Korea. Yet something in her, perhaps for the first time realizing a sense of lack, was compelled to seek identity and reason during this two-week trip to her home country.

“Return to Seoul” spans about eight years, and Freddie seems to deal with a push-and-pull relationship with her home country through her 20s and 30s. When she’s younger, she distances herself from her heritage by insisting she’s French to her friends and blood relatives. In some ways, she comes to accept her biological family.

Embracing them, however, is another story — one that’s not told in this film.

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Finding belonging in a foreign country

Freddie doesn’t fit in in Korea, and that’s the way she likes it.

She is brash, loud, direct, sexual and not afraid of creating a scene — and Park conveys her wild and unpredictable range of emotions with dexterity that you wouldn't expect from a newcomer. Though Freddie looks Korean, she doesn’t speak the language, and manages to get by with English and help from French-speaking locals.

The scene that will stick with me is one early on, when Freddie’s new francophone friends Tena and Dongwan (Son Seung-Beom) take her to a local restaurant.

That’s where her otherness is most apparent.

She shrugs off the custom of serving other people’s drinks — but not pouring your own — and seems to break tacit social customs by encouraging different groups of young diners to put their hesitations aside and sit together to drink soju. One of the men tells his friends that she doesn’t look French, and the diners start debating her “pure Korean” features.

Here, her peers offer a sense of belonging by affirming her Korean-ness despite her unfamiliarity with their language and drinking games.

Surely, Freddie has had to contend with being an East Asian woman in France. Being ethnically — but not culturally — Korean in South Korea is a unique experience: She fits in, appearance-wise, but her mannerisms, blunt communication style and devil-may-care attitude stand out in this culture.

It’s up to Freddie to determine her identity, and that’s not something she will find in her adoption file or in her biological parents.

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'Return to Seoul' 3.5 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Director: Davy Chou.

Cast: Park Ji-Min, Oh Kwang-Rok, Guka Han, Kim Sun-Young.

Rating: R for brief drug use, nudity and language.

Note: In select theaters in Phoenix on Feb. 24.

Reach Entertainment Reporter KiMi Robinson at kimi.robinson@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @kimirobin and Instagram @ReporterKiMi.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Return to Seoul' review: Newcomer Park Ji-Min stuns as the lead