The phenomenal box office success of Lee Sang-il’s Kokuhō – a sprawling epic about the friendship and rivalry between two kabuki actors – has been regarded as something of a miracle in Japan. The surprise stems from the status of kabuki: despite being a centuries-old art form of immense cultural significance, it remains neither broadly understood nor widely appreciated.

Lee, a versatile filmmaker whose work spans multiple genres, does not set out to elucidate the kabuki tradition, nor does he weave its stylised artifice into the film’s own aesthetics, as others have done before him. His approach is to enlarge and elongate – to render kabuki as spectacle in purely cinematic terms.

The story begins in Nagasaki in 1964 and unfolds over fifty years. After the murder of his yakuza-boss father, fourteen-year-old Kikuo (Soya Kurokawa) is taken in by Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe), the foremost kabuki actor in Osaka. Under Hanjiro’s strict tutelage, Kikuo apprentices as an onnagata (female impersonator) alongside the master’s son and heir apparent, Shunsuke (Keitatsu Koshiyama) – a boy of similar age and ability, if not quite equal dedication – with whom he quickly forms a bond.