A coming-of-age story centring around an adult’s personal issues with their adoption would be really interesting and, quite frankly, a cathartic outlet for those viewers who share similar feelings.  Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is very close to pulling off this type of character study, but it doesn’t quite go as far as it can with this premise.

After being raised in France, Freddie (Park Ji-Min, in a star-making acting debut) decides to return to South Korea to locate her birth parents.  She encounters hurdles that test her own emotions and tolerance and, no matter how hard she tries to mull through it, her pain is carried over throughout her adulthood.  Once we see Freddie at her most curious, audiences are reunited with her twice at different, older ages.  Writer/director Chou tries to chronicle this span of time with different looks for Freddie and environments, but this broken-up arc interrupts the emotional investment between the viewer and Ji-Min’s acting.  Plus, because time and experience has forced Freddie to change her personality and have a bleaker, more sheltered outlook, the audience feels like we’re not watching the same performance.  While this doesn’t quite pan out for the filmmaker, this gives Ji-Min the reassurance that they could have a flourishing future playing multiple characters in another project.

Chou, however, has a knack for portraying intimacy and vulnerability between characters, which suggests the filmmaker know how to work with actors to bring out the very best performance they’re capable of.  I hope this skill eventually bleeds over into his writing.

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Addison Wylie: @AddisonWylie