Cannes Review: Koji Fukada’s Love on Trial Gracefully Unpacks Idol and Agency

What is love? For some, it is mutuality––a chemistry, care, and concern that blossoms into an equally supportive relationship. For others, it is devotion––a one-sided, obsessional affection that the lover finds selfless. Japanese idol group Happy Fanfare sing about love, but they’re not allowed to pursue their own––such is the “No Love” clause present in […] The post Cannes Review: Koji Fukada’s Love on Trial Gracefully Unpacks Idol and Agency first appeared on The Film Stage.

May 26, 2025 - 04:35

Cannes Review: Koji Fukada’s Love on Trial Gracefully Unpacks Idol and Agency

What is love? For some, it is mutuality––a chemistry, care, and concern that blossoms into an equally supportive relationship. For others, it is devotion––a one-sided, obsessional affection that the lover finds selfless.

Japanese idol group Happy Fanfare sing about love, but they’re not allowed to pursue their own––such is the “No Love” clause present in their contracts. Their romantic isolation is deemed vitally important to the business of idol stardom, allowing their male fans to hold onto the fantasy of the attainable yet unattainable female. This ideal is perpetuated by meet-and-greet sessions where the quintet express fond recollection of fans’ past gifts and comments. A parasocial relationship is nurtured, but the cracks start to show when reality creeps in.

Koji Fukada (Harmonium, A Girl Missing) is known on the festival circuit for cool, often unsettling character dramas that put the family unit in flux. Love on Trial is something of a departure: a heartfelt, Hamaguchi-shaped work of two halves that expands his palette to suit an ever-more-openly political cinematic climate.

As talented young women with heaps of charisma, it’s only natural that the five members of Happy Fanfare would encounter similar young men. Junior of the group, Nanako, becomes friendly with a male YouTuber, only for scandal to ensue when photos of the pair singing karaoke are leaked to the public. The group’s agency reminds the girls that relations with the opposite sex are strictly forbidden, and Nanako is returned home to live with her parents while the higher-ups work to rehabilitate her image.

Amid all this, group lead Mai (Kyoko Saito) strikes up a friendship with street performer Kei (Yuki Kura) after they catch each other’s eyes in a local park. Kei is the Tuxedo Mask to her Sailor Moon, a fellow performer who understands the front-facing demands that an audience can bring. But their worlds are not the same. Kei is under significantly less control––he’s male and comparatively low-profile. He keeps watch over Mai while living out of a compact camper van, there when she needs him. When backlash against Nanako’s relationship transgression escalates to a terror incident (a startling sequence that recalls Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue), Mai snaps––she can no longer hold herself back from the love that brings her life meaning and sees her in totality. In full view of her groupmates and managers, Mai runs to him.

Both Mai and Kei are sued by the agency for violating the No Love clause, and what follows is an engrossingly beat-by-beat drama of the legal complications that arise from her decision. Fukada and co-writer Shintaro Mitani capture these struggles with a keen focus on the chemistry and everyday moments shared between the couple. Their lives and love are remarkably mundane, and our hearts and empathy are captured through their relatability––the supposed crime is love for one another.

Fukada germinated Love on Trial when, a decade ago, the real-life version of this case hit domestic news. It feels right that this film should see the light of day now, in a post-MeToo industry increasingly working to give a voice to female talent. The film’s casting is pointed and poignant: lead Kyoko Saito has worked as an idol herself in group Hinatazaka46, and has since retired; Yuki Kura has also worked as a model; Erika Karata, who plays the group’s manager, is a Hamaguchi alum (Asako I & II) with her own experience of gendered media scrutiny.

Their performances are understated; so is the film that wraps around them. This is an idol story that only occasionally electrifies. There are no big, dramatic confrontations––only the slow suffocation of an industry that constrains these characters and the glimmering catharsis of the personal love that seeks to set them free. These events accumulate in the spectator’s mind, anger cementing itself as the presented injustice becomes plain. Fukada quietly foregrounds that these events are all too real, these characters only human.

Your level of confusion when confronted with these realities may vary. Many European audience members at the Cannes premiere seemed bemused; a fair few walked out. Love on Trial does not offer concessions to international audiences in overexplaining what an idol outfit is or why these groups have historically been managed this way. Instead, Fukada cleanly presents elements and examples that demonstrate the complex business interplay between the artist and audience in Japan, his film much like evidence in a trial from which we can draw our own conclusions.

Love on Trial premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Koji Fukada’s Love on Trial Gracefully Unpacks Idol and Agency first appeared on The Film Stage.