Two decades after her Oscar-nominated Hollywood breakthrough in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, Rinko Kikuchi gets to showcase her considerable comic gifts in Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!, released in the US last month. She plays Haru, a widow who falls for her handsome ballroom-dance instructor even as she remains haunted by her late husband (whose lingering presence takes the surreal form of a giant crow).
What follows is a heady mixture of grief, desire, fantasy, and dance, complete with elaborate musical interludes and a delirious homage to Dirty Dancing. Kikuchi makes Haru’s occasionally mortifying romantic pursuit both funny and affecting, embracing the character’s impulsive, sometimes ridiculous behavior without diminishing the depth of her loss. Inspired by director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s own mother, the film offers a refreshingly frank portrait of middle-aged female desire. And for an actress whose adventurous filmography spans the Hollywood blockbuster Pacific Rim and the offbeat indie Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, the role draws on more of her range than ever. She shimmies, fantasizes, embarrasses herself, and ultimately makes a convincing case for the possibility of joy after heartbreak.
Jeon Do-yeon, meanwhile, brings to Possible Love the extraordinary emotional acuity that has made her one of Korean cinema’s most compelling performers. Nearly 20 years after winning best actress at Cannes for Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, she reunites with the director for his first feature since 2018’s Burning. Opening in US theaters this Friday before arriving on Netflix on November 6, the densely layered drama explores class, marriage, and the uneasy relationship between artistic ambition and exploitation.
Jeon plays Mi-ok, whose husband hasn’t found work since losing his factory job. When a wealthy documentary filmmaker approaches the couple about chronicling the plight of laid-off workers, the two women develop an unlikely friendship, drawing their husbands into an increasingly fraught relationship that exposes the economic gulf between the couples.
Jeon is marvelous in the role, allowing flashes of envy, resentment, and longing to surface beneath Mi-ok’s cheerful, accommodating manner without diminishing her warmth or loyalty. Through subtle shifts in expression, she reveals a woman far more complex than the long-suffering wife she might initially appear to be. It’s a talent she has demonstrated throughout her career, including as a domestic worker drawn into a destructive affair in 2010’s The Housemaid.
