Director: Lee Sang-il

Stars: Ryo Yoshizawa, Ryusei Yokohama, Mitsuki Takahata, Ken Watanabe, Shinobu Terajima

This adaptation of Shuichi Yoshida’s 2018 novel is the highest-grossing live action Japanese film to date. It begins in 1964 with the killing of a kabuki performer during a yakuza shootout. His son Kikou Tachibana is taken on as an apprentice by kabuki actor Hanai Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe), with Hanjiro and his wife Sachiko (Shinobu Terajima) more or less adopting the fourteen-year-old. Keiko begins training alongside Shunsuke, Hanjiro’s similarly aged son. The duo develops a brotherly bond, and when Hanjiro takes them to see a performance of Heron Maiden, by national treasure kabuki artist Magiku (a mesmerizing Min Tanaka) they are inspired to form a duo they call To-Han.

Over a stately paced three hours, director Lee elegantly charts the adoptive brothers’ decades-spanning friendship and rivalry, and how it is tested by time and events, most notably a tragic accident. The fifty-year Japanese milieu is lavishly rendered with outside events alluded to via fashion changes and incidental chatter, while the depiction of the hermetically insular kabuki world feels lived-in and authentic, as well as insightful for audiences with only a passing familiarity with the medium. Playing the characters in their adult incarnations, Ryo Yoshizawa & Ryusei Yokohama skilfully handle the characters’ troubled arcs and are equally impressive as kabuki performers. There is the occasional lull, and the plot sometimes veers into mannered melodrama off-stage, but the kabuki performances, deftly captured by cinematographer Sofian El Fani, often in intense close-up, are electric.

David Willoughby

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