“A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, but it may be that you come away from this “masterfully sweeping” drama thinking – was three hours enough?
Spanning 50 years, it opens in 1964, in Nagasaki, with the brutal killing of a crime boss in front of his 14-year-old son Kikuo (Soya Kurokawa). A year later, Kikuo, who has already shown promise as an amateur kabuki artist, is sent to Osaka to sit at the feet of Hanjiro, a highly revered kabuki actor (played by the great Ken Watanabe). Hanjiro has a son who is the same age as Kikuo, and the two train together as onnagata – men who play the female roles. Over the years we follow their fortunes – their “deep friendship” and “blistering rivalry”. And of course there is a lot of kabuki, a form of theatre similar to ballet, which is “highly stylised” and involves “fantastically precise movements”. It makes for a “true spectacle”.
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