Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing‘s latest role puts her at the center of an unusual dynamic: a Chinese caregiver drawn into the fixation of an aging, stroke-paralyzed Japanese widower. The film is also a selection at the Busan International Film Festival. Over a four-decade career, Wang’s credits include “Chan Is Missing” (1982), “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and “Smoke,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Berlinale.
Fan plays Susu, daughter-in-law and sole caregiver to Utsugi (Lily Franky). She describes Susu’s position as complicated — someone with real influence over Utsugi, but also vulnerable and dependent on the family around her. The actor resists framing her character as either predator or victim.
Rather than settling the question of who is using whom, Fan says she was more drawn to the emotional exchange between two people who both need something from each other. That refusal to settle on a single reading extends to how Fan and Franky calibrated the relationship’s tone on set. Working closely with Wang to find the right register, the two actors treated the bond as something built on desire and imagination rather than conventional physical intimacy, letting Susu’s willingness to draw close or pull away shift scene to scene so no single interpretation of the relationship ever hardens into place.
Fan says the character’s outsider status shaped how she approached nearly every scene, drawing a direct line between Susu’s position and her own experience working across borders. Instead, he encouraged her to draw on her own instincts, having spent years navigating multiple cultures himself and understanding the particular feeling of being inside a culture while still observing it from the outside. Fan says a woman like Susu today occupies a different social position, with more awareness of her own choices, than a woman would have had in the early 1960s.
That contradiction is what interested her most: Susu has agency, but she also has limitations. Fan says she deliberately avoided deciding, even for herself, how Susu truly feels about Utsugi at any given moment. She didn’t want to resolve for audiences whether Susu loves him, pities him, uses him or feels some combination of all three at once.
At this stage of her career, she says she’s more concerned with whether a character moves her than whether it fits any particular image of her, adding that she still wants to discover parts of herself she hasn’t shown before. She says she enjoys roles that let audiences forget they’re watching Fan Bingbing and simply see the character. The role continues a run of international collaborations Fan has built since 2023, when “Green Night,” directed by Han Shuai, premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival.
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