A Wild Child’s ‘Return to Seoul’ Flips the Script

Freddie — nobody calls her Frédérique except her French adoptive mother — has devised a way, at 25, to be in control of every relationship and every situation. Manic and mysterious, inviting and forbidding, tender and cruel, she keeps friends, lovers and strangers off-balance.

She is a rock, she is an island, as some Boomer singer-songwriter put it. Or to cite the on-the-nose lyrics to the song she thrashes wildly to in a Seoul bar, “I never needed anybody.” (She doesn’t seem to hear the chorus, “You can’t make it alone.”)

Davy Chou’s profoundly rewarding Return to Seoul (opening Friday, Feb. 24) lets us (and Freddie, eventually) see that the persona she’s crafted isn’t a choice as much as a reaction. Placed for adoption as an infant by her South Korean parents, she grew up internalizing their painful decision as an act of abandonment and betrayal. In response, Freddie identifies as French, doesn’t speak Korean and disavows her roots.

By a twist of fate, or the power of destiny, or the unyielding impulses of the subconscious, Freddie is in Seoul because her flight to Japan was canceled due to a typhoon. Not one to burn her limited vacation time stuck in an airport, she hopped on the next available plane.

Once in South Korea, though, she decides she might as well seek out her birth parents. Bound by no ties, practiced at walking away, and trusting her ability to sight-read (situations as well as music), she underestimates the risks.

Return to Seoul is an engrossing character study with the free-floating tension of a Patricia Highsmith thriller. The movie benefits enormously from the performance — and the script changes — of French-Korean visual artist Park Ji-Min. Making her screen debut, Park carries the film with her enigmatic yet expressive face: She conveys Freddie’s accessibility and aloofness, desire and disgust, playfulness and rigidity with a subtlety and clarity that still leave plenty of space for the viewer’s interpretations.

For his part, Chou has made a movie about the modern world — with its fluid borders, cross-cultural connections and obstacles, transient identities and easy reinvention, fleeting relationships, evaporating traditions — that doesn’t rely on a frenetic, fragmented “modern” film style. He keeps us glued to his characters’ faces without being either ponderous or pretentious.

We may think we know where this story is going, and which forks it will encounter en route. Indeed, Return to Seoul kinda sorta follows the road we expect for the first hour.

Freddie’s birth mother doesn’t respond to the adoption agency’s outreach. Her father, however, is touched and thrilled to meet his daughter, show Yeon-Hee (her birth name, which means “docile and joyful”) where he grew up, buy her an unwanted present and introduce her to his wife and children. Nonetheless, their extended encounter, frustratingly negotiated in Korean, French and English, is defined by its awkwardness.

Freddie’s abrupt departure — a quick wave as she escapes in a taxi — suggests the end, in her mind, of her journey into the past. A wholly unexpected jump forward in time, au contraire, alerts us that it was the beginning. Freddie isn’t the only one thrown off-balance: From here on, Return to Seoul offers the pleasure of unpredictability and, just as exciting, the growth and evolution of a character.

I’m not going to reveal any more of the plot, though I will say that Davy Chou and Park Ji-Min take a satisfyingly intimate drama and neatly transform it into an epic saga. (With an open ending in the spirit of old-school European art films.) They lay out the welcome mat, then yank the carpet from under your feet. Let that be a lesson: Sight-reading only takes you so far.