Lee Sang-il’s heartfelt drama spans 50 years following the bond and rivalry between two brothers who play the rigorously observed female roles in the traditional art form
Lee Sang-il’s heartfelt and muscular epic (whose title means “national treasure”) was a box-office smash on its Japanese home turf, winning a host of festival awards and an Oscar nomination. It’s a mighty Cain-and-Abel drama spanning five decades, set in the rarefied world of kabuki theatre where some of the most exotically prized performers are the onnagata, the men who have mastered the rigorously observed discipline of playing women in classical kabuki roles, a convention which arose from Japan’s 17th-century banning of women on stage, rather as they once were in England 100 years before. It is a semi-intentional irony of this intensely and even passionately male film that actual women are of subordinate importance.
The story begins in an outrageously melodramatic way, with a situation which might even itself have once been amenable to kabuki dramatisation. In 1960s Nagasaki, a yakuza gangster is holding a social event to underline his prestige; he has provided kabuki entertainment for his guests, and such is his reverence for this Japanese high-cultural form that he has permitted his teenage son Kikuo to perform as an onnagata. Kikuo’s performance stuns a renowned kabuki actor called Hanjiro, played by Ken Watanabe. But the event is chaotically attacked by a rival gang, the yakuza is killed, and Hanjiro offers to adopt Kikuo and train him up as a onnagata in his kabuki company, alongside his own son Shunsuke.
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