The Current Cinema and Streaming on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and others - Rod Bishop recommends RETURN TO SEOUL (Davy Chou, France, South Korea, Cambodia, Belgium, Germany, 2022)

Carlo Battisti in Umberto D; Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives; Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields; Jay Davidson in The Crying Game; Bjork in Dancer in the Dark; Barkhad Abi in Captain Phillips; Sasha Lane in American Honey; Yalitza Aparicio in Roma; Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry in Beasts of the Southern Wild. 

All non-actors acclaimed for their first screen performance. Ji-Min Park in Return to Seoul stands with the best of them.

In fact, a large number of the characters in this film are played by first-time actors, but you’d never guess. In the lead role, playing an adopted Korean brought up in France, but returning to Seoul in her late twenties to search for her biological parents, Ji-Min Park is so authoritative and commanding you’d never guess it was the first time in front of cameras for this established visual artist.

Her character Frédérique (“Freddie”) Benoit can’t speak a word of Korean and in the first couple of scenes, she relies upon the French-speaking Seoul residents Tena (Guka Han) and Dongwan (Son Seung-Beom) to guide her towards Seoul’s leading adoption agency.

Ji-Min Park, Return to Seoul

There she finds a lot of red-tape restrictions and at one-point asks why the agency spends more time protecting the biological parents than it does helping the adoptees.

When she does make contact with her father and his new family, the culture-shock is overwhelming and the headstrong Freddie is sent into a spiral of clashing emotions.

Writer-director Davy Chou, a French-Cambodian, has described his film as “two different sides of a broken history”, and Return to Seoul follows Freddie through many challenging changes in her personality. There are several time-jumps and, at one point, she grapples with her new career selling missiles (“for peace, not war”) while confronting the often clinging and controlling expectations of her French and Korean families.

Ji-Min Park is outstanding in the role. A lot of her changing emotional states are conveyed by looks, glances, stares and grimaces: visual non-verbal communication that is unique to the cinema. When done right, as it is here, the film develops an explosive power.

Ji-Min Park, Davy Chou

There are interviews with Ji-Min Park and Davy Chou on You Tube that are almost as entertaining as the film. Chou recounts how just prior to the shoot in Korea, Park asked for a meeting to discuss her character Frédérique. She had taken notes for almost every scene she was to be in, citing sexism and the male gaze among her concerns. 

“I told him if we can’t work together, hand in hand, I can’t be in the movie because I can’t do something I’m politically ashamed of. It’s impossible…I was fighting for the creation of my character”.

She took to the screenplay’s second section, telling Chou that Frédérique’s sexiness, blond wig, short stockings and short dresses were a cliched depiction of young Asian women and represented “the hypersexualized, objectified woman that you have in your fantasy”.

Elsewhere Park has said: “There are no more roots. The violence that a child can feel, when the culture, the language, everything is different. I think it’s like a trauma…it’s also something that I can understand, when you feel that you belong to a society, but you don’t look like, for example, French society. All my experiences as an Asian woman living in France, that’s helped. It’s sad to say that all the violence that I can feel everyday helped me to play that role”.

Selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2022, Return to Seoul failed to win any awards. 

Must have been a hell of a year on the Croisette.

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Return to Seoul is screening in Sydney exclusively at the Golden Age Cinema in Surry Hills. Next screenings on Sunday 30 July and Tuesday 1 August.  CLICK HERE to book or check session times.