Rinko Kikuchi and Jeon Do-yeon are playing women in midlife
In Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!, Rinko Kikuchi plays a widow who wants her dance instructor. In Possible Love, Jeon Do-yeon plays a wife deciding what a richer woman gets to film.
The Goldscene Desk
Rinko Kikuchi, the Japanese actress, is 45. Jeon Do-yeon, the Korean actress, is 53. On Oct. 23, Lisa Wong Macabasco put them in Vogue with two other actresses. Kikuchi and Jeon are the ones playing wives.
In Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!, Kikuchi plays Haru, a ballroom dancer in Tokyo. She and her husband, Luis, played by Alejandro Edda, are competing when he dies. She stays in the house for nine months. Her sister and cousin get her back to the studio, and she falls for the instructor, Fedir, played by Alberto Guerra. He is in an open marriage. She wants him anyway, and she tells him Luis is still alive. Luis keeps showing up as a giant crow.
Haru's family calls her Ha-chan. That is also the name of director Josef Kubota Wladyka's mother, a ballroom dancer he dedicated the film to. He won the directing award in Sundance's US dramatic competition. Sony Pictures Classics opened the film on Sept. 25, and it is still in some cities.
Kikuchi's Oscar nomination came in 2007, for Babel, when she was 26 and played a deaf teenager who does not speak. Haru is a middle-aged widow, and the film lets the crush be embarrassing.
Possible Love is the first film in eight years from Lee Chang-dong, the Korean director of Burning. Jeon plays Mi-ok. Her husband, Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, lost his factory job after a strike that was violently put down, and they have a 10-year-old son. Cho Yeo-jeong, who played the wealthy wife in Parasite, is a documentarian who wants that layoff on camera. Mi-ok says yes. Ho-seok will not. Jeon plays the warmth and the envy in the same face.
The last film she and Lee made was Secret Sunshine. It won her best actress at Cannes in 2007, the first time a Korean actor took an acting prize there. The people page has the rest of the career. Possible Love won the Silver Lion at Venice, the festival's Grand Jury Prize. It had a short US theater run starting Oct. 23, and Netflix has it on Nov. 6.
Macabasco also wrote about Tao Okamoto, who shared best actress at Cannes in May with the French actress Virginie Efira. Okamoto plays a theater director with terminal cancer in All of a Sudden, from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the director of Drive My Car. Neon opens it on Nov. 25. Hoyeon, from Squid Game, plays officer Sung-ae in Hope, Na Hong-jin's creature movie, which opened in the US on Sept. 9.
