Our review of Return to Seoul: An Original Quest

Orphans usually make people cry in cottages and movie theater. This is the kind of Freddie, the heroine of Return to Seoul, the new film by Franco-Cambodian Davy Chou, noticed at Cannes (in the Un certain regard section). Alternately cold, taciturn and suspicious, like a wounded animal, the young Frenchwoman puts her feet in South Koreathe country of her biological parents, whom she has never known and whom she has never sought to find until this day.

She puts her bag down in Seoul, hangs out with a gang of young people. She is told that she has a typical Korean face. Her mother refuses to meet her. Her father has rebuilt his life with another woman in the south of the country. He drinks. He offers her to come and live with him.

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Freddie prefers to make a living in Seoul, a solitary night owl among the dancefloor crowd. When she dances, her body expresses all its angry sadness. She sleeps with boys, whom she seduces and mistreats. She prefers old people. She…