‘Blonde’ review: A Japanese teacher faces a student rebellion in messy yet entertaining satire

Dir: Yuichiro Sakashita. Japan. 2025. 103mins

An indecisive, eager-to-please schoolteacher struggles to connect with his rebellious students in Yuichiro Sakashita’s Blonde, an often-funny critique of the Japanese school system, the speed and power of social media and the natural tension between youth and adulthood. With a sometimes-messy script that has a few emotional and narrative gaps, Blonde doesn’t say a lot that we haven’t already heard – but it does so in an entirely entertaining fashion.

An often-funny critique of the Japanese school system

Sakashita started his career in more art-based dramas like The Rakugo Movie (2012) and The Tokyo Wind Orchestra (2016), but really hit his stride with topical comedies Go To See Pinkerton (2018) and The Sunday Runoff (2022). Blonde continues in much the same vein, and its subtle jabs and deeply flawed central character (played to histrionic perfection by singer-dancer Takanori Iwata) make the barbs go down easily.

Premiering in Tokyo competition, the film could become a modest hit when it opens in Japan in mid-November, and may also secure further berths in Asian festivals. Further afield, cinematographer Yuta Tsukinaga’s clear, bright, standard images and Sakashita’s unvarnished directing make the film a natural fit for streaming services overseas.

Blonde is essentially a coming-of age film, although it’s 30-year-old Japanese middle school teacher Kenta Ichikawa (Iwata) who needs to grow up, rather than his students. As the film begins, he is having a minor personal meltdown after his girlfriend Misaki (Migi Kadowaki) asks him what he thinks of marriage. He looks stunned, freezes mid-answer and breaks the fourth wall to tell us why he’s so tongue-tied.

This becomes a running motif, as Kenta’s internal flabbergast and constant doom scrolling become fodder for a running monologue in voiceover. Immediately, he informs us that his flummoxed reaction stems from a stressful day at work, when roughly 20 of his students arrived at school with bleached blonde hair. Leading the charge is Itaroku (Tamaki Shiratori), who simply wants the school to amend its draconian rules about appearance.

This minor act of resistance inevitably snowballs into a national issue and media frenzy after the Prime Minister himself condemns the behaviour. Somehow, the mass protest becomes Kenta’s fault and, as the situation goes from moderately silly to ridiculous, Kenta and Itaroku eventually find themselves fighting the same fight.

Voiceover and fourth wall breaking can be fraught with all manner of grating clutter, but Sakashita deploys this potentially ruinous gimmick in just the right doses. At times, Kenta’s diatribes can feel like exposition; he laments an education system based on testing, one that exploits its staff and frequently leaves them without the tools to actually teach.

More often, however, the turns of phrase and twisting non-answers he concocts in his head, and sometimes gives voice to, say just as much about Kenta’s own insecurities, immaturity and blind spots as they do about conformity and blind obedience. When Kenta tells Iratoku that breaking rules isn’t the way to foster change, she simply asks “why?’. It’s a response that collapses Kenta’s argument in seconds and tells us everything we need to know about him, as well as the rigid rules that govern Japanese social norms to a fault.

Iwata and Shiratori make for a nice duo, a student-treacher relationship in which she’s clearly the adult. Kadowaki also lends strong support, lifting her put-upon girlfriend role well above its station.