Rikyu

Set in late sixteenth-century Japan, Rikyu centres on Sen no Rikyu, a tea master whose mastery of the tea ceremony brings him close to the warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Hideyoshi is unifying the country by force and nursing still larger ambitions, while Rikyu uses the ceremony and its invitations as a quiet instrument of diplomacy, seeking to temper his lord's designs. The tension between the warrior's ambition and the tea master's restrained authority shapes their relationship.

Hiroshi Teshigahara directed and co-wrote the film with Genpei Akasegawa, working from a subject far removed from the modernist novels that had inspired Woman in the Dunes in 1964 and The Face of Another in 1966. Rikyu was the third of the three features he directed, and it shifted his attention to a historical Japanese setting and to the aesthetics of tea. Rentaro Mikuni plays Rikyu, Tsutomu Yamazaki appears as Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and the cast also includes Yoshiko Mita, Kyoko Kishida, Tanie Kitabayashi and Ryo Tamura. Teshigahara Productions handled the production.

The film runs 135 minutes and was released in September 1989. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.1 from 915 votes, while on TMDB its rating is 7.5 from 35 votes, a small sample that makes the higher figure less firm than the IMDb average. Both indicate a generally favourable response rather than a widely seen one.