Written All Over Her Face

A star-making performance elevates Return to Seoul to a masterwork.

- By Angelica Jade Bastien

There’s no cinematic terrain as potent as an actor’s face. Seeing on it a flexible configuration of internal needs, cultural mores, and wayward desires, writer-director Davy Chou understands this truth intimately in Return to Seoul. He grounds his story in the contours and illuminations of lead Park Ji-min’s features and expressions in a debut performance so piercing it makes the entire film move like a breathing poem.

Park plays Frédérique “Freddie” Benoît, a 25-year old Korean woman adopted by a white French couple soon after her birth, who has returned to her ancestral home in a fluke. Her original flight to Tokyo was disrupted by a typhoon, and she opted for the first destination available, or at least that’s how she puts it to her mother in a terse video call. Freddie finds herself at a modest hotel in Seoul, where she studies the face of front-desk worker Tena (Guka Han) with Korean pop songs blaring over her headphones. Freddie’s own features fill the frame, and the audience studies her in kind; there’s evidence of something wild in those eyes. She is a live wire given form, flesh, sinew. She’s a woman defined by what she refuses to be, and Chou appropriately refuses to offer any heartwarming, simple resolutions to the dilemmas marking her life.