- Kiki Kirin, who died last year at the age of 75, plays a tea ceremony mistress in her latest film, "In a Garden That Looks Eternal", in theaters this Wednesday.
- Famous in Japan for her colorful career, she was only recently revealed in France in the role of a Dorayaki pastry specialist in “Les Délices de Tokyo” by Naomi Kawase.
- The actress also played the grandmother of "A Family Affair", the Golden Palm at Cannes in 2018.
She was called Kiki Kirin, because her previous nickname, the laughing-eyed Japanese actress, auctioned her off on a TV show. Having "nothing else to sell", the Japanese cinema icon chose that day to give up his first stage name, Chiho Yûki. She was like that, Kiki Kirin, exuberant in life as well as uncompromising on screen.
Abroad, Keiko Uchida - whose real name is wife, married to the friend of John Lennon, the psychedelic rock singer Yuya Uchida - was discovered late, by the grace of almost all of Hirokazu Kore's films- eda. The French public had particularly appreciated her as the facetious grandmother of Une Affaire de famille , Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018. But also in Les Délices de Tokyo by Naomi Kawase in 2015, a film in which she made delicious dorayaki (a typical Japanese pastry) despite an illness that was slowly eating away at her. A character to which his very last role fits perfectly in the very delicate In a garden that looks like eternal , by Japanese director Tatsushi Omori, which is released in theaters this Wednesday.
"My physical body is not really mine"
Kiki Kirin plays there a mistress of tea ceremony who teaches young disciples for many years and who perfectly symbolizes the lessons of life that she dispenses with as much tact as authority over the seasons. Twenty or twenty-five years later, his students are still there, in this Garden that looks like eternal . And her too ! What more beautiful homage than a film which tells how the fact of taming time allows to reach a spiritual harmony out of time, even if Kiki Kirin ended up passing away in September 2018, a few days before the release of the film in Japan.
Throughout a career marked by countless successes, it is his way of facing intimacy with death that will have marked the spirits. Over the past fifteen years, her mediatically assumed battle with her breast cancer has forged in her a rare franchise (Kiki Kirin did not hesitate to take out her x-rays in front of her producers when she wanted to decline a role) and a detachment facilitating her farewell: "An important lesson that I learned from the disease is that my physical body is not really mine", she repeated often, according to statements reported in the press kit of the film.
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