Koji Fukada’s Cannes Premiere Finds Drama in Art’s Unfinished Forms
In Nagi Notes, a visit to a museum, a sketch in a notebook, and a half-carved sculpture carry as much emotional weight as any confession. Koji Fukada’s new film, which premiered on 13 May at the Cannes Film Festival, places art at the center of everyday life in Nagi, a remote farming town with a military base on Honshu, and asks what people reveal when they make, look, and imagine.
The film follows Yuri, played by Shizuka Ishibashi, as she travels to Nagi to visit her friend Yoriko, a sculptor played by Takako Matsu, and sit for her in the studio. Yoriko works in a space crowded with busts and figures in various stages of completion, including portraits of Yuri’s ex-husband and Haruki’s late mother. Her method is tactile and unsparing: she molds clay, then carves wood with a chainsaw and chisel. The result is not polished distance but visible labor, the kind that leaves a mark on both material and subject.
That physical process becomes the film’s emotional grammar. As Yoriko shapes Yuri’s face, the two women talk about marriage, loss, solitude, and the difficulty of separating the self from other people’s expectations. Fukada keeps returning to Yoriko’s hands, making the act of sculpture feel like a form of attention — and, at times, a form of pressure. The film’s interest is not simply in representation, but in how being seen can alter a person’s sense of identity.
Art in Nagi Notes also emerges through younger eyes. Haruki, played by Waku Kawaguchi, sketches Yuri and hopes she will marry his father. Keita, played by Kiyora Fujiwara, draws migratory birds and is disappointed to learn that Yuri and Yoriko are not a gay couple. Their drawings are not side details; they are extensions of desire, curiosity, and social uncertainty. Even Yuri’s gift of a book about Edward Hopper suggests that looking is never neutral.
A scene at the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art sharpens that idea. Yuri and Haruki move through Ubiquitous Site • Nagi’s Ryoanji • Architectural Body, by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, a permanent installation that the film treats as both architectural space and emotional threshold. The work’s tubular passage and distant glow invite reverence, but Fukada is equally interested in the visitors who enter it with laughter, chatter, and their own assumptions. Art, the film suggests, does not produce a single response. It draws out whatever a viewer brings to it.
That sensibility places Fukada in conversation with Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose films also find drama in quiet exchanges and uncanny parallels. But Nagi Notes is especially attentive to the way sculpture, drawing, and even unfinished work can hold grief without resolving it. In Fukada’s hands, art is not an escape from life. It is one of the places where life becomes legible.
