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It's easy to understand why artists would be drawn to stories about artists. Self-reflection is a powerful siren call, and the particularities of another creative's tale can help you elide the pitfalls of more direct auto-fiction. This is especially true for those who consider the artistic practices beyond their chosen medium. In this year's Oscar race for Best International Film, we find two such projects. They represent journeys of inverse success, one about failure and the other focused on glory beyond reason. But of course, such greatness comes with a price that can be as bitter as a floundering. A film looks at the smallness of man, another at being bigger than life, inspiring awe and alienation, losing humanity along the way.
First up, there's Simón Mesa Soto's A Poet, representing Colombia. And then Lee Sang-il's Kokuho, selected by Japan after proving itself a box office hit…
A POET, Simón Mesa Soto
Divided into four chapters whose titles strike a note of crescendo-ing irony, A Poet considers the sad sack existence of Oscar Restrepo, erstwhile poetic prodigy from Medellín and current unemployed divorcée with little more to his name than two books nobody cares about and a daughter who resents him. To soothe his pains, the failed wordsmith drinks too much and argues even more so, baring his resentments like a snarl at anyone who gets close enough. However, this is an unsustainable situation, and, whatever faults Oscar may have, he's no victim of self-aggrandizing delusion. So, when pushed by a sister who admonishes him for depending so much on their infirm mother, he finds a job at a local high school. And things only get worse from there.
Because, in his classroom, Oscar finds a girl of uncommon artistic sensibility and a way with words that's impressive enough to bypass the description of "gifted" and reach for something greater. Yet, Yurlady isn't too keen on meeting her teacher's high hopes for herself, getting dragged into a world where her humble attempts at expressing what goes on inside are turned into a commodity and talking point. "Art will save us" becomes the most outrageous lie in this scenario. And, fittingly, while director Simón Mesa Soto may show an appreciation for verse, his view on the world of contemporary Colombian poets suffers not from fawning admiration. Instead, he takes to it like a forensic surgeon looking for the cause of death.
He cuts through the rotted tissue of a liberal stronghold on the arts that defines every avenue of success as kowtowing to the demands of some cynical hierarchy where oppression is not a material condition as much as it is cultural cache to be exploited by those who least endure it. The writer-director is not shy about it either, going for bluntness when argumentatively necessary or just comically viable, as when the dynamic between Oscar and a fellow poet turns into a literal pissing contest. Later, as the relationship between mentor and mentee comes into question, Soto has the discernment to resist the temptation of polemic.
A Poet keeps true to the portrait of an irresponsible man whose self-awareness doesn't preclude him from burning bridges, burying himself deeper at each turn or being the sad cliché everyone else sees in him. That it does so while recognizing systemic insufficiencies is a testament to its qualities, both as scalpel-sharp social satire and pitch-black comedy. In perfect tune with its lead, warts and all, it follows Ubeimar Ríos' gremlin-esque tour de force as the foundation for the cinematic edifice. Which, to be clear, is a film that avoids the lyricism its title might suggest, negotiating the rare bout of Tatian grace with a deliberate gruff – think of the ragged edges of an unmasked celluloid frame, the stiffness of a scared man running like a kid who doesn't yet know his body, all while wailing a pathetic plight for salvation that will never come.
KOKUHO, Lee Sang-il
After its world premiere at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight, Lee Sang-il's Kokuho went on to become a box office smash hit back home, beating Hollywood blockbusters and securing the status of the second-highest-grossing Japanese live-action film in history. It's quite the achievement for a three-hour literary adaptation about the life of a fictional kabuki actor, following his journey from 1964 Nagasaki to a new millennium in what amounts to an epic of identity as intersected by cultural heritage, centuries-old class systems and the nightmare of self-effacement in the name of beauty, perfection, those faraway ideals of success and greatness. Kokuho translates roughly to 'living national treasure,' a kind of honorific that strips the subject of their personhood.
From the Heron Maiden to the Love Suicide doomed paramours and back again, Kikuo's existence is oft defined by the roles he plays on stage rather than his private life beyond it, no matter how much attention the script pays to treasons and petty rivalry, the codes of an order defined by blood more than talent, the reckless choices of a genius that feels like he has nothing left to lose, rooftop breakdown and opportunistic sex. We even meet him in preparation for performance, first seeing the young man's face under onnagata makeup before we ever understand him as his own person. At first, an amateur wunderkind in the roles of men playing women, so typical of Kabuki tradition, he soon finds himself adopted into a dynasty of stage legends.
This change comes only after bloody tragedy, as the erstwhile scion of a yakuza clan witnesses his father's murder and, bereft of home, forges a new life for himself under the tutelage of the great Hanjiro. Soya Kurokawa, so splendid in Kore-eda's Monster, taken on the teenage version of Kikuo, all hungry eyes and naked ambition of youth. In his hands, Kokuho vibrates with promise lost and found in reticence, elliptical cuts and transitions that find solid ground in a lead performance that tempers its mysteries with palpable humanity. The same can't be said when Ryo Yoshizawa takes on the protagonist responsibilities, re-configuring the epic around a much trickier proposition.
The adult Kikuo puts the mystery of greatness before every facet of recognizable humanity, gambling on an unknowability that pulls you into the void like a black hole's gravitational grip. In other words, it's alienating by design, paralleling director Lee Sang-il's appeal to artifice as a way to understand and scrutinize his protagonist's fixation. Under his command, Kokuho could be seen as the transformation that takes us from the opening scene's "real" snow to the paper flake storm that christens aged Kikuo on stage. Separated by three hours of a narrative that's so sprawling as to feel rushed despite that runtime, these versions of snow denounce the central tension in Kokuho's formal conception.
Lee obsesses over the materiality of Kabuki performance like a man in the desert finding an oasis after days of parched wanderings. His camera drinks in the detail of rich textiles, the thickness of paint on skin, the lace-lines of wigs and the sweat that congeals underneath layers of fantasy. It's most evident when things go wrong, like a passing-the-torch ceremony interrupted by a black blood spurt. But it's also there when putative perfection manifests for the characters. It's in the frantic camerawork that comes in opposition to the performer's economical gesture, improvisational movements versus precise formality. In this choice, one presumes a search for authenticity.
Truth be told, it doesn't always work, and, at times, it can feel as if Lee is trying to sabotage our assessment of the Kabuki performances within the film. Which would be a pity, as his main cast literally dedicated a year and a half of their lives to preparation. And that's not just the Kikuos, as the role of Hanjiro's son, Shunsuke, is nearly as important. Indeed, I'd go so far as saying that Ryusei Yokohama threatens to steal Kokuho from Yoshizawa, so sublime is his descent into degradation and phoenix-like rise only to succumb to a body's betrayal. Though, positing one actor against the other would be to repeat the characters' errors.
Kikuo and Shunsuke's partnership is echoed in the chemistry Yoshizawa and Yokohama find with one another. When they're together in front of the camera, every other star is outshined, be they Ken Watanabe or Min Tanaka. Furthermore, the film's fragilities recede until they are all but forgotten. Who cares about the text's lack of engagement with the history happening along these men's pursuit of an actor's immortality? Who even stops to think about the rhythmic dysfunction or the red scars of abridgement? Such things are nothing when the brightness of great performance shines on us, bedecked in some of the year's best costumes, glorious theatricality to the sound of a score that combines Kabuki classics with the lushness of a full film orchestra.
In some ways, Kokuho becomes about the sunk-cost fallacy as applied to the artist, the audience, the characters within. For the road to awe, to true beauty, is paved with pain and sacrifice and the erasing of the self. It demands libations of one's own dignity and that of others too, unwittingly given or taken by force, such horrors in contradiction of the elegant goal. And results gotten, you both love the splendor and hate the pain. But, oh, the splendor… was it worth all that ignobility? Maybe, maybe not. When you're at the end of the path, even if the cost was too much, you have to tell yourself it was the right thing to do, that you can live with the means for this so-called happy ending. The alternative is madness.
A Poet and Kokuho played as Special Presentations at TIFF 50. Soto's film will be distributed in the US by 1-2 Special, while Lee's epic is under the umbrella of GKIDS.