By any recent standards, 2025 was a good year for film, but overlooked in this are a few extraordinary films where the organizing principle was the backstage drama.
The most prominent of these is Richard Linklater’s extraordinary Nouvelle Vague, which follows the late Jean Luc Godard as he films Breathless in the street of Paris in 1960, which launches a new wave, literally, of street level filmmaking that intuitively matched the overdrive culture launched by rock n roll and about to explode into the modern, interconnected media world we live in today. Of course, it wasn’t nominated for anything. It’s in French and is about Godard, who is Godardian, and Godardian is synonymous with elitism at the Superbowl party.
If that wasn’t backstage busy enough for Linklater, he also released his Blue Moon, with Ethan Hawke reduced in height by CGI to inhabit the grand stature of lyricist Lorenz Hart, patiently waiting on the night of March 31, 1943 offstage in Sardi’s during the Broadway debut for his former partner and protégé Richard Rodgers’ and his new partner Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!
So let’s push on in this vein to another film, which is opening today, Kokuho, set in 1952, in Postwar Japan, in the world of Kabuki Theatre, the 17th century Japanese form of opera, The screenplay by Satoko Okudera is based on a runaway best-selling novel in Japan by Shuichi Yoshida, brought to the screen in the third collaboration with director Sang-il See.
The story is set in the household of the grand master of Kabuki theatre, Hanjiro Hanai, played by Ken Watanabe, the Japanese international film star who played opposite Tom Cruise in Ed Zwick’s The Last Samurai in 2003, toplined as Gen. Kuribayashi in Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima in 2006, and with Leonardo DiCaprio and an all-star cast in Christopher Nolan’s generation-defining film, Inception in 2010.
The heir to the title of grand master is Hanai’s son Shunsuke, but after seeing a magical amateur performance by Kikuo, the son of a Yakuza Gangster, the master takes the Yakuza’s son into his house and under his tutelage, when the boy is orphaned. That sets up a rivalry for who becomes king of Kabuki that takes shape over the 50-year span of this grand, edge-of-your-seat epic struggle.
I’ll translate this short clip from the film:
He’s extraordinary, says the corporate backer of the Kabuki troupe, after seeing the young ruffian’s audition. But what about your son?
It is Kukuo who will replace me, says the dying grand master Hanjiro.
In their eyes, Kukuo stole the Hanjiro name from the family
I want to be a real actor, Kukuo says.
All you have to fight your detractors is the art of Kabuki itself. “
At stake is recognition of being the great national treasure, which is what the title of the film, Kokuho, means. Great “national treasure.”
This is no small task. It is more than just mastering the precision of the song and dance of mythic operas already defined by three centuries of legendary performances, as one in the West might have to stare down the ghosts of Maria Callas singing Tosca, Joan Sutherland Lucia di Lammermoor or Leontyne Price Aida.
In Japanese Kabuki, it is a story of the onnagata, men singing and acting the parts of tragic heroines, stemming from the 17th Century Shogunate ban on women performing onstage.
The two onnagata performers vying to be crowned as the master’s successor are captured in two brilliant performances by Ryo Yoshizawa as the adopted challenger, and Ryusei Yokohama as the legitimate heir apparent. Backstage, they’re male as male can be; you’d think you’re watching two guys duking it out in the locker room to be the pitching ace of the Yomiuri Giants, Japan’s NY Yankees. Onstage, they perfect the release of feminine passion in graceful suspension of song, leg, and dress. The erotic undercurrent in Kokuho is not homoerotic but one of gender fission, masculine-feminine.
It is easy to simply get lost in this toggle between backstage and onstage, between which son — the biological or the adopted -- is willing to sacrifice more for his art, but this epic 50-year story pointedly begins in 1952. And a Japanese audience understands that they are seeing the great postwar struggle between legacy and meritocracy, between high born and low, when Japan saw the rise of the corporate state and comes to terms with the failure of the divinely based imperial Japan that led to what the young Yakuza son recalls here as the A-Bomb disease that claimed the life of his mother.
Kokuho is shot brilliantly by Sofian El Fani, who mastered the art of intricate intimacy in Blue is the Warmest Color, Cannes’ 2013 Palme D’or winning lesbian love story, who with editor Tsuyoshi Imai and the production designer (Yohei Taneda), art director (Nao Shimoyama), and Kabuki director Ganjiro Nakamura IV create something magnificent. One early scene is choreographed chaos that sticks a landing in a perfectly composed still of a beautiful murder.
I don’t know what a masterpiece is, really, other than something that over time transcends its initial indifferent reception by critics to be hailed as one 40 years on. Think Citizen Kane, Vertigo, even Chantal Akerman’s 1975 Jeanne Dielmann. Perhaps that will happen to Kokuho, perhaps not. It was the highest grossing live action Japanese film in country, which does not suggest masterpiece, but it was the Japanese nomination for Best foreign film sent to the Academy’s selection committee. Which yawned and sent it packing.
I am reduced to two bars of success for a film: 1) Did I think of Donald Trump and our debased corruption of government once during the three hours that I was transported elsewhere? That’s the Low Bar of success. And 2) Is the film thrilling? Is it beautiful? And is it ambitious, about something bigger than its thrilling, beautiful self? That’s the High Bar of success. Kokuho effortlessly leaps over both the high and low bars. It began in Cannes last May and opens this week at the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan and in Los Angeles. See it before it’s gone.
