Every year, I scan the list of films submitted by various countries for the Best International Feature Film award, looking for entries that are already available online when the list is complete around December, and then tracking the 15 films that make the annual shortlist. Some of those don’t become available until well after the Oscars, something I will never really understand since it seems like films like those lose the opportunity to cash in on the brief moment of added publicity. Cambodia’s submission this year, Return to Seoul, became available to rent digitally in mid-April, allowing me to catch up with it after it never played in a theater near me. The film, which is in French and Korean, made several critics’ lists of the ten best movies of 2022, and would have made my top ten as well. It’s an exceptionally well-done and moving look at a woman’s attempts to connect with her biological parents in South Korea, only to find that everything involved in the journey is more complicated than she anticipated. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)
We meet Freddie (Park Ji-Min, a first-time actor) at four different points over about ten years, on separate trips she’s taken from France, where she went as an infant with her adoptive parents, to South Korea to try to locate and meet her biological parents. The first trip is an “accident,” or so she tells her parents, as her flight to Tokyo was cancelled, and she ends up connecting with some locals, one of whom speaks French. They go out on the town and eventually she learns from the French speaker that her only way to get information on her biological parents is go back to the Hammond Adoption Center, which arranged her adoption 25 years earlier. Her father is very interested in reconnecting with her, while her mother declines multiple requests from the adoption agency until she relents several years later. At first her father and his family want her to join them as if nothing happened, even suggesting she move to Korea to live with them, but even that relationship, where Freddie’s disinterest seems so clearcut, evolves in subtle and surprising ways.
Those two stories intertwine with Freddie’s own personal one, as we see her interacting with friends and struggling to find her own identity as someone who was visibly different from her adoptive family, yet doesn’t speak Korean and has no natural affinity to the place or culture of her birth. The script touches on themes of nature versus nurture, cultural alienation, and identity, without resorting to preaching or overly simplistic connections (such as blaming any of Freddie’s behavior on the fact that she’s adopted). It avoids easy explanations or pat resolutions, and neither parental storyline ends happily or unhappily – much is left ambiguous and it’s clear that there would be quite a bit left to both stories if the film had continued.
This is the second film by writer-director Davy Chou, after 2016’s Diamond Island, and he has said in interviews that he based this story on the life of a friend who was adopted from South Korea by French parents, as well as his own experiences as the child of a couple who fled Cambodia for France during the former’s civil war in the 1970s. He cast Park after meeting her through a friend, and she is a revelation here – it’s hard to believe this is her first professional acting role, as Freddie displays a gamut of emotions that all paper over a fundamental loneliness that defines her character. The emotional impact of the film, especially the scenes where Freddie meets her mother and some of her interactions with her father, depend almost entirely on Park’s portrayal, and she delivers with the right amount of emotion and expression. It’s a moving experience that leaves you wanting just a little bit more about Freddie, even as it ends on what seems like exactly the right note.