Return to Seoul review – absorbing and emotional Korean drama about adoption – The Guardian

The implacable forces of nature, nurture and future are what this film grapples with; it’s a actually emotional and absorbing drama about adoption with terrific performances (many from nonprofessional first-timers) and compelling soundtrack musical cues. Franco-Cambodian film-maker Davy Chou directs, co-writing the screenplay with artist Laure Badufle, a Korean adoptee introduced up in France whose private story impressed the movie.

Park Ji-min makes her appearing debut in a task that mirrors her personal life in addition to Badufle’s: a Korean with adoptive French dad and mom. She performs Freddie Benoît, a footloose twentysomething who on a whim comes on a visit to Seoul, checks right into a hostel for foreigners and imperiously decides that the well mannered, French-speaking receptionist Tena, subtly performed by writer Guka Han, can be her submissive finest good friend. Freddie is wise, trendy, a badass and pressure of nature who impulsively invitations everybody in a neighborhood cafe to hitch her at her desk the place she is holding courtroom with Tena and Tena’s shy good friend Jiwan (Kim Dong-Seok); she later seduces after which airily rejects him when the poor infatuated man pathetically declares his everlasting love.

However Freddie’s confidence wobbles when Tena tells her she might, if she needed, contact her organic mom and father in South Korea, and the movie permits us to grasp that this after all was what Freddie at all times meant at some unconscious degree. Via an adoption company, she discovers that her Korean mum and pa are divorced; she finds her father simply sufficient, a heartbreakingly sweet-natured man performed by veteran actor Oh Kwang-rok, now remarried with teen youngsters and devastated with the suppressed guilt on the abandonment which her reappearance has introduced again to the floor. Boozy and maudlin, the dad piteously asks her to stick with his household, begins nearly stalking her, begging for forgiveness, nearly as pathetic as Jiwan.

However simply as she refuses to be a part of her father’s life, her mom refuses to see her, and a horrible query permeates the whole movie: might Freddie have inherited from this absent girl her egotism and creativity, her expertise for seduction, disruption and transferring like a whirlwind via individuals’s lives? And if she will be able to’t observe down her mom, now a ghost past attain, does this imply she is going to by no means perceive her personal id and the that means of her personal existence? It’s a piercingly unusual and certainly tragic predicament which the movie coolly tracks via eight years of Freddie’s life; that is gripping storytelling, and an excellent efficiency from Park Ji-min.

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