Italian Premiere | Special Screenings | Out Of Competition
Japan, 2025, 175’, Japanese
Directed by: Lee Sang-il
Screenplay: Okudera Satoko
Cinematography (color): Sofiane El Fani
Editing: Imai Tsuyoshi
Music: Hara Marihiko
Producers: Murata Chieko, Matsuhashi Shinzo
Cast: Yoshizawa Ryo, Yokohama Ryusei, Nagase Masatoshi, Watanabe Ken, Takahata Mitsuki, Terajima Shinobu, Tanaka Min
Date of First Release in Territory: June 6th, 2025
Films set in the Kabuki world are few, understandably so since the challenge of getting it right is so great. Daniel Schmid’s 1995
The Written Face and Takayama Yukiko’s 2004
The Maid of Dojoji Temple met it by casting real onnagata – players of female roles in all-male Kabuki – as leads: Bando Tamasaburo in the former film, Nakamura Fukusuke in the latter.
Based on Yoshida Shuichi’s two-part novel, Lee Sang-il’s monumentally ambitious and visually sumptuous
Kokuho takes another approach, with two young non-Kabuki actors playing rivals-slash-friends in Kamigata Kabuki, which once flourished in the Kansai region that encompasses Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe.
The film, which was made with Kabuki star Nakamura Ganjiro IV as advisor, brilliantly solves the authenticity problem, at least to the eyes of this non-expert. Stars Yoshizawa Ryo and Yokohama Ryusei spent months training to deliver stage performances that, captured by cinematographer Sofiane El Fani’s fluid and insinuating camerawork, are both convincing as Kabuki and arresting as drama. Also, the glimpses of their off-stage lives, from the application of their elaborate make-up to backstage tensions and business calculations, feel like insider immersions, however brief.
The film’s story, scripted by Okudera Satoko, may turn shouty and even violent at times, but transforms Yoshida’s doorstop of a novel into a tightly focused, if episodic, narrative that under Lee’s assured direction rarely flags despite the film’s nearly three-hour running time.
Covering a span of five decades, it begins in 1964 with the shocking killing of a Nagasaki yakuza boss (Nagase Masatoshi) by a rival gang as his teenaged son Kikuo looks on. Fast forward a year to Osaka, after the boy’s failed attempt at revenge, when he is accepted as an apprentice by Hanai Hanjiro (a fierce-eyed Watanabe Ken), the head of a local Kabuki troupe.
Starting leagues behind Hanjiro’s son Shunsuke, who was born into the Kabuki world, Kikuo quickly and enthusiastically catches up, even though Hanjiro is a harsh taskmaster.
Jump head again to 1972, when Kikuo (Yoshizawa) and Shunsuke (Yokohama) create a sensation appearing together as onnagata in the Kabuki dance
Futari Fuji Musume (Two Wisteria Maidens). But it is Kikuo, with his pop-idol good looks and burning passion for Kabuki, whose star shines brighter. Nonetheless he and the talented, if not as driven, Shunsuke remain close friends, like comrades in arms who know each other as no outsiders can. This friendship, however, is shaken when Hanjiro chooses Kikuo to star solo in the classic Chikamatsu Monzaemon play
The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. He is again a hit with audiences, but a disappointed Shunsuke departs from the troupe.
From this point, not halfway in the story, it seems obvious that Kikuo, not Shunsuke, is destined to become the title
Ningen Kokuho or Living National Treasure – a high honor awarded by the national government to masters of a traditional art or craft.
Kikuo’s path to this pinnacle is anything but smooth, however, and Shunsuke later resurfaces, his dream of Kabuki glory still alive, if not well. Both men have women in their lives, but whether as a wife (Shunsuke’s) or lover (Kikuo’s) they leave little impression.
Instead, the film’s central relationship remains that between Kikuo and Shunsuke, through illness, setbacks and, in Kikuo’s case, growing isolation as his art becomes both his life and the core of his being.
Kokuho gorgeously and starkly shows us both his triumph and tragedy.
Lee Sang-il
see the catalogue p. 273