Kokuho

The ritualised formality of Japan’s kabuki theatre tradition can be baffling to Western audiences. 

With its garishly painted faces, elaborate costumes, and exquisitely precise movements and speech modes, it can be something of an acquired taste. Could the sumptuous delights and behind-the-scenes drama in Lee Sang-il’s Oscar-nominated Kokuho (literally ‘National Treasure’), the most successful live-action Japanese film of all time, serve as a gateway to this uniquely oblique and obscurantist art form?

Although no longer forbidden to do so by law, as they were for more than a hundred years, women generally don’t play the heroines in kabuki. Instead, the female roles are played by onnagata – highly specialised male performers who are not so much female impersonators as male representations of female characters. 

One of these onnagata is Kikuo (Ryo Yoshizawa), who is taken under the wing of legendary second-generation kabuki actor Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe) after the boy’s father, a member of the yakuza, is murdered. This sets Kikuo up for an epic, decades-long conflict with Hanjiro’s son Shunsuke (Ryusei Yokohama), a third generation onnagata, not least because heredity is an important part of kabuki actors’ heritage. Imagine if Tippi Hedren’s daughter, Melanie Griffith, adopted a young actress more talented than her own daughter, Dakota Johnson, and forced them to co-star in multiple movies. 

It’s a wonderful demystification of a mysterious art form

Over the course of the five decades the film traverses, from the 1960s to the 2010s, the relationship between the two stepbrothers – frenemies for life – makes for high drama almost worthy of a kabuki itself. The music, the costumes, the shimmering cinematography and period detail are impressive, but where Kokohu stands or falls, depending on your tolerance for the art form, is in its sumptuous kabuki staging – accompanied, for novitiates, by a brief caption explaining such stories as ‘Wisteria Maidens’ or ‘Two Lions’.

It’s arguably ironic that, in a film based on an art form in which men take the women’s roles, the female characters remain largely offstage – with the notable exception of Shinobu Terajima as Hanjiro’s wife/Shunsuke’s mother. But Kokuho is a film about tireless, even ruthless dedication to an art form in which it is possible to rehearse for a lifetime, yet never fully perfect. And while it would be interesting to see a film about a woman trying to break kabuki’s glass ceiling, part of Kokuho’s charm is that it celebrates the art form as it is, not as it might be. It’s a wonderful demystification of a mysterious art form.

In UK and Ireland cinemas May 8.