At age 91, Mitsuko Kusabue may not be the oldest professional actor to ever appear in a film — that honor belongs to Norman Lloyd, whose last screen role at age 99 was in Judd Apatow’s 2015 comedy “Trainwreck” — but she charges up the screen as the star of the whimsical, lighter-than-air comedy “Let’s Meet at Angie’s Bar.”
Directed by first-time feature director Yurugu Matsumoto, who worked as an assistant director for Nobuhiko Obayashi, and scripted by Daisuke Tengan, whose credits include scripts for his father, Shohei Imamura, the film is a Kusabue vehicle that showcases her still formidable charisma and comedic skills.
Born in 1933, the actor was a favorite of Japanese cinema’s golden age auteurs Mikio Naruse (“Scattered Clouds,” 1967) and Kon Ichikawa (“The Inugami Family,” 1976) and has enjoyed a long, flourishing career on both the big and small screen playing a variety of roles, often with a comic slant.
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