"Return to Seoul" is the Best Film of 2023 So Far
Park Ji-Min delivers a chaotic, incendiary performance in Davy Chou's tale of a French woman struggling to connect with her Korean roots.
As you could tell by the title, I want to be up front about this one: Return to Seoul is the best movie I’ve seen in 2023. If you’re reading this, check every movie theater in your vicinity to see if it’s still playing. It won’t be for much longer, so use this review as your impetus to catch up with one of the year’s most singular, chaotic, and enchanting cinematic experiences.
Frédérique “Freddie” Benoît (Park Ji-Min) is a woman adrift, but that doesn’t even begin to cover it. A Korean adoptee who was raised in France, Freddie is visiting Seoul for the first time, having been redirected there from a flight to Tokyo due to a typhoon—or at least this is what she tells her mother over terse Skype conversation, one that reveals depths to her emotional reticence. She answers each of her mother’s questions in choppy, brittle responses. She fails to inform her that she has just gone to meet her biological father for the first time, despite having professed never wanting to reconnect with her Korean roots. Their conversation ends abruptly when Freddie, emotionally distant, pretends that her internet has cut out. The audience is left guessing as to where Freddie is lying, and where she is telling the truth. It’s possible that she herself can’t tell the difference.
One thing about herself that Freddie makes abundantly clear: she is NOT Korean. Having grown up in the countryside near Paris, Freddie maintains a pride in her French identity that leads to some awkward confrontations with some new Korean friends. In an early scene in Return to Seoul, Freddie has dinner with Tena (Guka Han) and Dongwan (Son Seung-Beom), a Korean couple who also happen to speak French. Tena and Dongwan take interest in Freddie’s Korean heritage, asking her if she is interested in paying a visit to the Hammond Adoption Center, from which most adoptees with Freddie’s history originate. Her face turns to ice. She spits her stance across the table: “I am French, not Korean.” Then, as Freddie begins to pour herself a glass of soju, Dongwan politely informs her that this would be rude—she is supposed to allow her friends to pour the soju for her. Her response? To pour herself a cup and knock it back without hesitation. Under Freddie’s rejective gaze, Korean customs must themselves become objects of ridicule.
Energized by her own disobedience, Freddie then decides to extend her vulgar allure to the rest of the room. She engages Tena and Dongwan in a social experiment: “Sight-reading” the restaurant’s other patrons as one would a sheet of music, Freddie scurries around the bar, haphazardly pulling strangers into a newly-formed social group. The scene is accentuated by Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset’s jazz-inflected musical score, adding to the chaos of Freddie’s lightning-rod social energy. Soon enough, she has electrified the rest of the bar, converting a hushed restaurant into a mob of drunk new friends.
This clearly isn’t the first time that Freddie has rewritten a social environment to her will. As her barnstorming confidence goes to show, Freddie is an expert in escaping uncomfortable situations, as in a later scene in which a nervous young man makes naïve romantic advances to her (“I want to begin a deep relationship with you”) at a bar. She deflects him, first by claiming, falsely, that she has a boyfriend back in France. When this doesn’t work, she scampers away from their conversation to the dancefloor, gliding across the bar, punching at the air in rhythmic, smiling fervor. Director Davy Chou chooses to film this scene in a single-take masterwork, one that displays lock-step synchronicity between the film and its protagonist. As she dances, we understand that she has just left her young suitor rudely, brutally devastated; we simultaneously witness her enter into a state of divine liberation. (There isn’t much of the film available online, but this dance scene is. It’s well worth a watch.)
These two contradictory traits—abject disrepect and transcendent independence—are at the heart of Freddie, and indeed Return to Seoul. The film takes place over eight years of Freddie’s life across four different sections, each displaying different facets of her multilayered character. In the first section (everything I’ve described in the above paragraphs), she is 25 years old, venturing for the first time to her ancestral homeland. She meets her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok) for the first time, a sentimental alocholic. He regrets having abandoned her as a child, and often sends her drunken apologies over text. Freddie receives them with disgust—not only can she not read them (they’re in Korean), she is affronted at the prospect of genuine emotions. This is a theme that returns again and again in Return to Seoul: Freddie’s Westernized inauthenticity is at frequent odds with the open emotions of Korean men.
The film then cuts to another section, two years into the future, with Freddie living with an underground tattoo artist in a part of Seoul that looks like it came straight out of Blade Runner. We then cut to five years later, where Freddie lives with her French boyfriend Maxime (Yoann Zimmer) while working as an international arms/defense-system dealer. (This is the one narrative detail in the film that is off-putting in the extreme, failing to mesh with the rest of the film.) In its concluding section, Return to Seoul then cuts to one year later, following Freddie on a Romanian backpacking journey into nowhere—a poetic coda if there ever was one.
The English title Return to Seoul is a direct translation from the French Retour à Séoul, though the film was originally given a different English title: All the People I’ll Never Be. It’s an apt phrase for a woman who—much like the protagonist of The Worst Person in the World, my favorite film of last year—hops between jobs, boyfriends, and lifestyles at the drop of a hat. In all her versions—adrift twentysomething, underground punk, international arms dealer—Freddie is never grounded, never fully understood.
Similarities between the two films don’t stop there, as Return to Seoul does for Park Ji-Min what The Worst Person did for its own star, Renate Reinsve: propelling their deserving careers in a skyrocketing upward trajectory. And as with Reinsve’s fertile creative relationship to her director, Joachim Trier, Return to Seoul finds its salience in its own director-actor collaboration. Davy Chou, the film’s writer and director, worked intimately on the script with his lead actress, who insisted on particular changes that made their way into the final product.
It shows: Park, a first-time actor, inhabits Freddie with astounding sophistication and detail. I write that out, and I can still hardly believe it. This is Park’s first-ever acting role, and it’s the performance of a lifetime. Self-destructive, self-liberating, and entirely transcendent, Park imbues her character with tsunamis of shifting emotion that roil and explode without warning. Chou knows it, too, wisely choosing to keep the camera trained on her face throughout the film’s running time. For as many personality shifts as Freddie goes through within the film’s eight-year timespan, it’s as not hard to track—Park’s expressive performance tells us everything we need to know.
As with all great films, no written review can properly encapsulate Return to Seoul’s singular energy. It is a tale of unexplored ancestry, a symposium of competing personalities, an examination of broken families and the ties that bind. More than anything, it is the story of an inimitable young woman whose character is brought to life with a performance that leaps off the screen. Hers is an incendiary spirit—she more than deserves your attention.