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Clarence Tsui

4/5 stars
With a story driven by beautifully restrained emotions and conversations steeped in philosophical queries about the meaning and significance of art, the Franco-Japanese co-production Nagi Notes combines the best of the two cinematic worlds it was born out of.
Unfolding across 10 days in a small Japanese town, the latest film from writer-director Koji Fukada (Love on Trial) demands a certain amount of attention and reflection from its viewers. But it is a task made all the easier by the nuanced performances of Fukada’s A-list cast and Hidetoshi Shinomiya’s beautiful camerawork.
Playing in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition, Nagi Notes is based on Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata’s Tokyo Notes, a play revolving around 20 characters sitting in a museum hall talking about their lives while a devastating war rages in faraway Europe.
In Fukada’s very loose adaptation of the 1994 play – which retains only two of the original characters and removes the spatial confines in Hirata’s Beckett-ish narrative – war and its imitations are also omnipresent.
On television, they see the devastation in Ukraine; up close, they contend with military trucks rumbling past their homes and the constant boom of regular drills taking place at a nearby training camp.


Amid all this, we see art. Nagi Notes begins with Tokyo-based architect Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi) returning to her ex-husband’s provincial hometown to serve as a model for the latest work of her former sister-in-law, the sculptor Yoriko (Takako Matsu).
As the two women work together – a process Fukada illustrates in great and affectionate detail with images and sound – their past is gradually revealed.
While they regale each other with their tales of disappointment and heartbreak, the bubbling chemistry between the two emotionally scarred women becomes more than palpable.
Acting as a proxy for their suppressed feelings, Fukada introduces a secondary narrative strand in which two schoolboys (Waku Kawaguchi and Kiyora Fujiwara) declare themselves a couple and try to run away.
The two young lovers’ audacity in owning up to and acting on their feelings could also be considered Fukada’s allusion to how artists – and people – should confront reality.

When Yuri expresses her despair over having to abandon her ideas to comply with the demands of her clients, Yoriko – who earns a living as a dairy farmer and a part-time art teacher for local students – argues that artists should never isolate themselves from the people and things around them.
With their contrasting views alongside many others presented in the film – a curator showing how cameras distort perceptions of the world, or people developing strong feelings for things they have only seen in photographs – Fukada seems to be asking what art should mean in the chaotic world we live in, and the jury is still out.
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Takako Matsu as the sculptor Yoriko (front) and Shizuka Ishibashi as her model in a still from Nagi Notes, which played in the 2026 Cannes Film Festival’s main competition.

Nagi Notes actresses Shizuka Ishibashi (left) and Takako Matsu (right), and director, screenwriter, editor, and producer Koji Fukada, arrive at the screening of the film at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France on May 13, 2026. Photo: AFP

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Featuring nuanced performances and beautiful camerawork, Nagi Notes asks what art should mean in the chaotic world we live in


Featuring nuanced performances and beautiful camerawork, Nagi Notes asks what art should mean in the chaotic world we live in.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Featuring nuanced performances and beautiful camerawork, Nagi Notes asks what art should mean in the chaotic world we live in

Featuring nuanced performances and beautiful camerawork, Nagi Notes asks what art should mean in the chaotic world we live in