Return to Seoul (French: Retour à Séoul; original English title: All the People I'll Never Be) is a 2022 drama film written and directed by Davy Chou, and starring Ji-Min Park as a 25-year-old French adoptee who travels to South Korea, seeking her biological parents.
Twenty-five-year-old Freddie, who was born in South Korea and adopted by French parents, arrives in Seoul "by accident" after her flight to Tokyo is cancelled. She bonds with Tena, the desk clerk at her hotel, and sleeps with a man she meets with Tena in a restaurant. Tena and a friend of hers tell Freddie she can only contact her biological parents through the Hammond Adoption Center.
Although Freddie first insists that she is not in South Korea to find her parents, she goes to Hammond and learns that the agency can send telegrams to her parents, who can respond and allow Hammond to arrange for a rendezvous or ask Hammond not to contact them again, a request Hammond must honor. Freddie asks them to send the telegrams. When her father responds, she travels to Gunsan to visit him, with Tena serving as their translator.
Freddie is initially uncomfortable, but agrees to stay three nights with her biological father's family. Afterwards, her father calls Freddie and sends her text messages declaring his regret for giving her up for adoption and promising a new life in South Korea. Freddie finds his relentless attention oppressive and stops responding. She goes to a bar with Tena and the man she slept with on her first night in Seoul, whose declarations of love she cruelly mocks, making Tena uncomfortable. As they are leaving, she tries to kiss Tena, who rejects her and tells Freddie she is "a very sad person".
Freddie tries to return to her hotel with the DJ from the bar, but is confronted by her drunken father, who scolds her for ignoring his attempts at contact and scares off the DJ. Tena then suddenly appears, but her father ignores Tena's attempt to speak to him and as her father grabs hold of her arm, Freddie screams at him not to touch her and leaves.
Two years later, Freddie is living in Seoul. She goes on a date with André, a weapons dealer, who tells Freddie that she would be good in his industry. Freddie tells him that it is her birthday, and that every year on her birthday, she wonders if her mother is thinking about her. At a surprise birthday party thrown for her, she reveals to a co-worker who is also an adoptee that her mother has finally responded to several follow-up telegrams to say she is not interested in meeting her. It is revealed that Freddie's father still emails her, but she largely ignores him. Freddie tells her co-worker to contact Hammond, but her co-worker says she is following advice to learn about the Korean culture and language beforehand.
Five years later, Freddie speaks broken Korean and works with André selling missiles. On a business trip to South Korea, she goes with her French boyfriend, Maxime, to meet with her father. Her father plays her a piano tune that he wrote and performed, and Freddie is surprised at how it moves her. She becomes annoyed at Maxime when he says to her father that it is Freddie's destiny to help defend South Korea from North Korea. After dinner, she breaks up with him, heads to the entertainment district, and wakes up the next morning alone in an alley.
Freddie learns that her biological mother has responded positively to another telegram from Hammond, sent by a sympathetic employee in violation of policy. Freddie and her mother meet at a Hammond facility and Freddie weeps as her mother embraces her. Her mother gives Freddie her email address so they can stay in contact.
A year later, on her birthday, Freddie arrives at a hotel seeking a room. She writes an email to her mother apologizing for not contacting her earlier, and says that she thinks she is happy. The email fails to deliver as her mother's email address is no longer valid. Freddie goes to the hotel lobby and notices a piano with sheet music. She sits down and attempts to sight read the music, hesitantly at first, but soon producing a beautiful melody.
Cast
Ji-Min Park as Frédérique "Freddie" Benoît, a French adoptee of South Korean descent searching for her biological family
Régine Vial Goldberg [fr] as Freddie's adoptive mother
Cho-woo Choi as Freddie's biological mother
Production
Director Davy Chou got the idea for the film from a similar experience with his friend, also a Korean French woman, Laure Badufle, in her 20s adopted from South Korean biological parents, who traveled with him to South Korea during the filming of his 2011 documentary Golden Slumbers to meet her biological father and grandmother for the first time.[6] Seeing how emotional their meeting was, he decided to make a film along similar lines. Not knowledgeable in Korean culture or the experience of adoption at first, he researched these elements by talking to his friend and other adoptees as well as reading books, identifying some similarities with his own life as the son of immigrants from Cambodia who had left the country before the Khmer Rouge took over. Chou met Ji-Min Park through a "personal introduction" and decided to cast her as Freddie, her first film role, as he saw her as someone who "shared the essence of Freddie's free-spiritedness". He further developed her characterization through conversations with Park, which "challenged some of his notions as a male director and helped him understand how a young French woman might respond to aspects of Korea's highly patriarchal society."[7]
The film is an international co-production between France, Germany, Belgium, Qatar and Cambodia.[8][9] Filming took place over six weeks in late 2021 in South Korea and Romania.[10]
Release
The film had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival on 22 May 2022 under the English title All the People I'll Never Be.[11] Shortly before its Cannes premiere, Mubi and Sony Pictures Classics acquired the distribution rights to the film in different regions, with Sony Pictures Classics changing the film's English title to Return to Seoul.[12][13]Return to Seoul was released theatrically in Cambodia on 18 November 2022 by Westec Media Limited,[14][15] in France on 25 January 2023 by Les Films du losange,[16] in Germany on 26 January 2023 by Rapid Eye Movies,[17] and in Belgium on 8 February 2023 by Imagine Film Distribution.[9] In the United States, it was released for a one-week awards-qualifying run beginning 2 December 2022 in New York City and Los Angeles, followed by a limited theatrical release on 17 February 2023.[18]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 97% of 122 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "Sensitively attuned to its protagonist's quest, Return to Seoul uses one woman's story to explore universal truths about the human condition."[19]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 87 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[20]
